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My husband and I met in 2001, were engaged in 2002 but were not married until 2005 because of the emotional abuse from his family. The worst of the manipulation and abuse is related to his attempts to gradually depart from their cultural/religious community so that he could introduce and eventually marry me.
A few days after telling them he was going to marry me the verbal and emotional abuse got so bad that he was forced to escape. Without a long-term place to live and with both of us committed to not living together before marriage, and with them calling hourly trying to find him and force him home, we wound up having a family-only ceremony two weeks later. The threats and calls stopped immediately because they firmly do not believe in divorce. We included his family hoping to avoid permanently isolating them, and they spent the day before tearfully and threateningly begging him not to marry me. They did eventually attend (short ceremony, no reception), but with attitudes more appropriate to a funeral than a wedding. It remains one of the most stressful and miserable days of my life.
We've gradually reconciled with his family to the point where we're at least on polite visiting terms from both sides (and helping with his sister's lavish wedding). However, the emotional scars left from this experience are most raw in the face of weddings. We have no photos, no happy memories, no announcements, and it's taken years to explain to friends why they didn't have the chance to join us in celebrating. I've reached the point where I can attend a friends' wedding with ready help and genuine happiness, but my husband and I both experience a lot of pain afterwards at the comparison of what we lost due to his family's abuse.
As part of our healing process we talked about having a "real wedding", which clearly is a renewal of vows and not a wedding. However, the hard and fast etiquette restrictions I've read (no wedding party, no veil, no cake, understatement understatement understatement) just opens all the wounds again by reinforcing the fact that his family permanently stole from us the one chance we had to share the joy of these traditions. As far as keeping it small and intimate, it was hard enough explaining to friends the first time why they weren't included; how could I possibly do it a second time? Our friends and my family are amazingly wonderful; I'd like to believe that they'd join us in our happiness without a judgmental thought.
We absolutely do not need gifts. While creating a registry would have been a fun part of the experience that helped us pick a style and set up a home, the only thing that concerns me is finding a good way to tell people gifts are not expected and have them understand we mean it. We currently live in a house with 5 other people and still do not own much in the way of personal household goods and our friends know it, so I'm concerned about mixed messages when we say "no gifts please."
Our marriage is phenomenal and I could not have married a better man in a million years. He was absolutely worth the wait, the pain and if we could never have anything even remotely resembling a wedding I still wouldn't look back. That's all the more reason though that I would love the chance to celebrate our love with friends in attendance and the memories most couples have.
Being able to hang a "wedding photo" on the wall of him in a tux and me in a white dress and veil, to spend the time on the stupid little details of colors and centerpieces would go a LONG way in healing the hurt we both retain from the abuse, and would also help me get past a huge hurdle I've had in being able to forgive his family. If ever "you can't" of renewal vow etiquette gets in the way and serves as a constant reminder of the pain, I simply don't think I can do this.
Simply put, my question is: Given our situation, our reasons for not having a wedding, how much emotional healing a wedding-like renewal of vows would be, does all the renewal of vow etiquette commanding "thou shalt not be weddingish" still apply?
[edited to add some additional relevant details about why we married so quickly after he left and that we don't plan to have a renewal of vows in the forseeable future)
This post has been edited by 1Question: 18 January 2026 - 09:14 PM
