Son's Fiance completely excluding groom's family from wedding-result of no ring/no bring

View Quoted Comment I think under normal circumstances, this would have been perceived differently. Unfortunately, after the negative experiences your son and FDIL had, and them no doubt expressing their anger and disappointment to her parents, this was not a great idea. You are likely going to have a long, uphill battle ahead of you. Moving forward, it would be wise to keep all communication between you and your son. Work on mending that relationship first. Then, when/if he feels a positive relationship can be built between you and his fiancé, he can initiate that. My best advice would be to stay humble, stay apologetic, and be patient.

I don’t think your behavior is racist, because - it seems - you would have made that antiquated, “no bring, no ring” decision” no matter what her race. However, I agree your behavior was incredibly outdated and rude- introductions at that party would have taken less than 15 minutes, tops, and in no way distracted from the party. That policy is incredibly unwelcoming. You can’t say in the same breath that you want to get to know your son’s girlfriend, and then ban her from family events. You didn’t think to reach out at anytime between June and Thanksgiving to meet the girl your son told you he was serious with? It seems like you only tried after they were engaged?

Have you straight out apologized for being so unaccepting, and not extending an invitation as you should have to the big family occasion. Reasons like, introducing someone new would have distracted from the occasion, or, we inapropriatelty did something to your sister, so now we have to continue and be equally inappropriate to you, are childish at best, mean at worst. When "our family's policy" is rude and exclusive, and someone appeals to you and you won't change it, you are seen as hostile. No surprise there. There are little errors in manners, forgetting to use Dr. when addressing someone, or obviously not listening when introduced to someone new. But you repeatedly did something most people consider very bad manners. So they shut the door. Sometimes a sincere letter, showing you thought about what you did, and realized you were way out of line from the beginning, helps. Our loved ones bring their loved ones to us expecting acceptance, that this new person in their life matters to them, and therefore is automatically welcome by you. No ring has alway been a rude policy and does not speak well for you, so when you apologize, say so. Hope that after making an apology, and a little grovelling, you can undo this. To expect instant acceptance as you seem to, is not something most people do. Trust has to be earned back. But the first step is saying you are sincerely sorry. ... Something we too often hear on WW is people right out saying, well I don't care about other people's manners/ standards of etiquette. That is old fashioned. But acceptance, and courtesy shown to other's loved ones, mattered yesterday, and will tomorrow.

View Quoted Comment Please don’t tell me you’re actually shocked that they don’t want any contact with you.


Reading your post, it looks like you made no effort to get to know your future DIL before they got engaged. Even if you were adamant about her not coming to the anniversary celebration, you didn’t suggest a dinner or another time to meet her? It just sounds like you were completely uninterested in meeting her.
The fact that your son has never had a problem about the “no ring, no bring” policy with past girlfriends should have been a clue to you how he serious he is with this woman. You didn’t find it strange that he all of a sudden cared about bringing his girlfriend to a family event to introduce to the family? The moment you he told you the reason he didn’t show up solo should have been a big giant clue that this was someone important to his life. Again, you disregarded his feelings and didn’t apologize? No wonder he didn’t include you when it came to his engagement. You’re either super self-absorbed and can’t see how dismissive and hurtful you’ve been towards them and their relationship. Not once in your post did you even mention that you and your husband apologized to your son AND his fiancé. If I were her parents, I wouldn’t want anything to do with you either especially after how you seemed so uninterested in their daughter. Which by the way (from the sounds of it) is the complete opposite of how they treated your son.

View Quoted Comment I 100% agree with this. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do. Continue to invite her or them occasionally to do things with you.

How are you supposed to know if it's serious, or even get to know her, if you refuse to have her come to events *before* they are engaged.

Your son is entirely in the right, here, and I feel badly for him and his FW.

DH's family was very inconsistent with their policies, and DH had to make a bit of a fuss about it, as it was *hurting both of us*, and *insulting both of us*. It's one of the reasons his dad took forever to figure out that DH wanted to marry me. He disliked that I was always invited (MIL's insistence), and then wouldn't talk to me. Suffice to say, leading up to our engagement got a little dicey.

It's better, now, but DH and MIL had to sit him down and be like, "wake the heck up".

Unfortunately I do not think there is anymore you can do. You made a bad first impression which are often lasting impressions. The no ring no bring policy is not good at all. I’ve been with my now fiancé for 8 years this august and while we finally got engaged in the 6th year, if his family followed that rule I would have been excluded from major events for years! That would have hurt. I would have missed out on countless graduations, thanksgivings, Christmas’s etc, because I was lacking a ring? Some couples take a while to get engaged because unfortunately it takes some a while to get grounded to get their own place and a stable job, all the things you want before getting engaged because it’s a huge step and you want the external factors to be in place. This was the case for my fiancé and I. Living in expensive NYC where renting a room can cost as much as 1,300. It took us 6 years to get out of our parents house. We did a yr of long distance before I transferred schools and finally got my degree a whole 3 years later. All of this factored into why getting a ring took so long. We didn’t want to be engaged living at home that was just us. We knew engagement meant we were moving into the next step which was starting a family and we wanted our own space for that. Though we knew from the very beginning we would be married, if we had to suffer through your policy for all those years it would have been devastating. My fiancé’s family invited me everywhere and I love them for it. The relationship I have with them now is because of my first impression of how welcoming they were and how they loved me immediately. Same for my fiancé. I have cousins who haven’t gotten married yet but have a whole family with the same boyfriend who the whole family met 10 years ago at a family function. So family functions are important to couples. It lets the family know this person is special if they were brought here to meet all of us. I took my boyfriend to all of them and that’s how he made his relationships with my family and knew I was serious about our relationship. Your policy tells people their lack of importance in your eyes or the family’s eyes. See that from your son and his fiancé’s perspective. All you can do is continue to reach out. She will see your efforts and hopefully one day you can mend and build a relationship.

View Quoted Comment Yeah, this! I hadn’t thought about it.


But yes, you should have reached out or in that same moment you told him the policy you should have set up a date to meet her over dinner at your house. Your efforts to want to meet her shouldn’t have come until they were engaged. It feels like you don’t recognize a relationship until a ring is put on it and then it becomes important. When in reality there are so many relationships that are longstanding and loving and that just as much real without a ring. Maybe you should think about ditching this rule. Just because it was your parents rule doesn’t mean you have to keep it. And just because everyone had to suffer through it doesn’t mean there were no hurt feelings. Some people keep their hurt inside just to keep the peace. I guarantee there were a lot of hurt feelings from the children told they couldn’t bring their significant other and to their now spouses. Just ask

View Quoted Comment "Something we too often hear on WW is people right out saying, well I don't care about other people's manners/ standards of etiquette. That is old fashioned. But acceptance, and courtesy shown to other's loved ones, mattered yesterday, and will tomorrow."


Totally agree, and I hope the people doing "no ring, no bring" or other arbitrary rules to cut down their wedding list see how damaging it can be

I just can’t get over the fact that you actually told your son meeting his then girlfriend at the party would have distracted from the occasion and then were surprised when he chose to tell you last that they were engaged. And then you went and made it about you again and how hurt you were. Imagine your son and his future wife feeling like you won’t take their relationship seriously until their engaged so they get engaged and you’re mad you weren’t included. I don’t think there’s anything else you can do at this point.

Good god, this seems like a really bizarre policy. Seeing how someone interacts with their family, and how their family group dynamics operate is up in the top five things I need to know about someone before evening considering tying my life to theirs. And I certainly want to see how anyone dating my children handles that as well.
I get a serious relationship only at catered events, formal occasions, where cost and space are important, but this seems so excessive.
Even the royal family invites girlfriends and boyfriends to events before engagements.

"My son asked if he could bring his girlfriend to the celebration. I said no-we have a no ring, no bring policy re holidays and serious family occasions."


This is a bizarre and exclusive policy to have. No ring no bring for weddings is crappy, but at least the justification is usually cost. But holidays and family reunions? That's just downright clannish and mean. By the time my fiance and I got engaged, not only had WE spent holidays with his family, my FAMILY had!
Her presence wouldn't have been distracting, or taken away from the celebration. Most new people just blend into the background and are occasionally approached with conversation.
You were completely in the wrong here and if this relationship can be repaired, it's going to take a long time. But you have to truly recognize your behavior was wrong (assuming you think it was).

I just noticed your title, and it rubs me the wrong way. This isn't his fiance excluding you, it's your son. Putting all the blame/responsibility on her is not right.

View Quoted Comment I agree with this as well.


This isn’t his future wife excluding your family. This is your son setting boundaries with people who refused to acknowledge the serious relationship he had with her before they became engaged.

View Quoted Comment This rule has mostly disappeared along with women hot working for pat outside the house, starting in the suxties. No ring no bring says your woman is of no value unless you intend to marry her soon, the ring. But as you may have noticed, it is very rare now for those who marry not to live together first, and that has been true for decades. And many do live together or see each other for 1-5-10 to 30 years. Denying anyone importance all that time because they are not engaged has been seen as really rude by most people for a long time. Marriage is not the most important thing. When grown children make a commitment as a couple and come to you as family, they expect acceptance.
They are now the most significant people in their likes, and family is expected to open the door.

I think there was a reason you didn't already know how serious your son's relationship is. Let him be an adult. I take it they were already serious (that can happen in any amount of time) when he wanted to bring her to the anniversary celebration. I would be furious if my mother did this. Thankfully she let's me be an adult and let's me make my own decisions and mistakes that come with it.

This post hurts my heart. I was with my FH for eight years before we got engaged, so I am adimently against no-ring no-bring policies in general. It's no one else's business to judge the seriousness of a relationship based on an arbitrary timelime. It would be a major red flag to me if my fiance's family refused to invite me to family events because I didn't have a ring. Your son is lucky that he's found someone who is willing to look past his family's faults.


If you want any sort of relationship with them moving forward, you need to stop making excuses for your actions and admit that you were wrong. Until then, any apology you make will not be sincere and won't help anything.

I might be in the minority on this (didn't have the courage to read all replies) but I wanna side with your son and his future wife.

The no ring,no bring rule is rude nowadays as more and more couples live together before the wedding and are courtships are longer, so many coupes have a strongly commited relationship without even being engaged.

I can see why you and your husband are hurt but I can see why your son and his fiance were.

I've been through a similar situation. My fiancee's cousin didn't invite me at hers because of this no ring,no bring rule . I personally wasn't upset at all but she was and decided , not only to kick herself out the wedding party (she was asked to be the maid of honor) and didn't attend the event at all.

She decided not to invite her and her hubby, not because she wanted a revenge but because their relationship was over after my bride decided not to attend her cousin's wedding.

I mean: you can't ask someone to celebrate your relationship AND disrespect theirs if it's a serious one.

So if you’re not engaged you can’t come to a party because that’s “distracting” to meet a girlfriend but if you’re engaged it wouldn’t be distracting to meet someone’s fiancée? Seems like backwards logic to me.


Unfortunately, I’m going with your son on this.

I haven't seen any mention of you sincerely apologizing for your actions, or even you acknowledging that you understand that your actions were extremely hurtful and disrespectful to your son and his fiancee. You just keep saying that you don't see what the big deal is because this is how your family has always done things. That attitude is completely dismissive of their feelings and tells them that you don't care that you hurt them. It's not surprising that they have set boundaries with you and don't want to involve you in the wedding planning after the way you treated them. You will never be able to repair your relationship with your son and his fiancee if you continue with this attitude.

All choices have consequences. As the host of any event, whether it be a wedding, anniversary party, or anything else, you have the right to choose who is invited. You do not, however, have the right to dictate how others feel about your choices, and you are definitely not immune to the consequences that your choices bring. You chose to adhere to some hurtful and exclusionary antiquated "policy" instead of considering your son's feelings and you are now suffering the consequences of your choice. There is really no easy way to fix this, if it's even possible to fix it at all.

I hope this post serves as a warning to others who want to institute a "no ring no bring" or other equally hurtful and disrespectful policy (only inviting SO's who have been together for X amount of time, for example) for invites to their weddings. Your choices can cause lasting damage to relationships.