A honeymoon is supposed to be a great bonding time for a newlywed husband and wife. Unfortunately, these mothers-in-laws (or monster-in-laws) did not get that memo!
People on Reddit share how their mother-in-law ruined their wedding. Content has been edited for clarity.
“We Have To Spend Every Waking Moment With Her”
“‘The Limpet,’ (AKA, my mother-in-law) has always been extremely needy and clingy (hence the name). Whenever she hears about our holiday plans, even if it’s clearly a romantic couples holiday with just me and my significant other, or a fun trip with a group of my friends – she will invite herself along.
She says things like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to (holiday place), I would love to come too,’ and ‘I can come but will stay in a different hotel than you if you want.’ As if she’s generously offering to give us some privacy by staying in a different hotel??
Recently, my significant other and I have taken up hiking and camping. The Limpet needs 5-star luxury hotels and would never be able to bring herself to go camping, so it’s an added bonus that she can’t gatecrash our holiday plans. But she will still try to invite herself to our camping holidays and say, ‘I’d like to come, but I’ll need to stay in a hotel nearby.’
The Limpet even invited herself to our honeymoon, again saying that she always wanted to visit Hawaii and that she would stay in another hotel. Luckily, my husband has been working on shining his spine over the years and told her a flat NO.
On the occasions when we do plan a holiday together with her, The Limpet lives up to her name and is constantly attached to us. We have to spend every meal and every waking moment with her, otherwise she throws a tantrum. Total nightmare.”
Jealous Reared Its Ugly Head
“My husband and I planned on going to Vegas for our ‘honeymoon; because it’s cheap, close by, and fun for us.
We recently booked everything for our trip probably a month ago, and are set to leave the day after our wedding. I posted about the wedding brunch my mother-in-law wants to have. It’s not happening, and she is still upset about it. She does not know why we are leaving the day after the wedding, although that is the norm for where I’m from.
Anyway, I was with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law a couple of days ago and was informed they also bought plane tickets to go to Vegas. On the same day as us.
Me: ‘That’s fun, but my husband and I will probably be doing our own thing the whole time since it’s kind of a honeymoon to us.’
Mother-in-law: ‘We can all do things as a new family because you and my son will have so much time together once you move in together.’
Sister-in-law: ‘Don’t be selfish about spending time with him.’
Me: ‘He will be MY husband.’
That was basically the gist of it, with both of them repeating the same thing over and over. I suck at standing up for myself but I did call my husband later and told him, and he was absolutely furious. Luckily, we were able to get a refund on our hotel we booked and 50% of what we paid for the plane tickets, and we hadn’t bought any tickets to any shows or anything yet. We are not telling them we are changing our plans and we are not telling them where we’re now going. It is very clear to me that they are jealous for some reason, and cannot stand the fact that he is getting married. I’m still angry about it but I’m happy we are changing our plans.”
“I Was So Taken Aback, I Didn’t Say Anything”
“My husband and I lived in a city two hours from the mountains. The foothills have a kind of artists trail with crafts, woodwork, craft breweries all forming a community where you can spend a couple of days exploring and still not see everything. When we were going out, my husband asked me to marry him after a weekend in the foothills. It was very romantic. Fast-forward to nine months before the wedding.
We had booked our honeymoon to be a week of exploring in the same area we got engaged. It wasn’t an expensive honeymoon because we had both just graduated, but it was special. We were excited, so we made the mistake of telling our families. Suddenly, my mother-in-law was selling her house, because of ‘bad memories’ from her ex-husband and moving to the area where we booked our honeymoon.
Still not realizing her levels of crazy, we helped her move and set up in her new home a month before we got married. Did it make the area feel a little less special? Yes, but were we going to let it stop us? Heck no!
So, we had a fabulous honeymoon. Luckily we didn’t tell anyone which hotel we were staying at in retrospect. But my mother-in-law made us promise to come to have tea with her on the last day of our honeymoon. We found it weird, still went. We went and were sitting there listening to her recount her thoughts about the wedding when suddenly this gem falls from her mouth
Mother-in-law: ‘So after the wedding, your aunt and I got in the car and drove around trying to see if we could find you.’
Me (heart sinking):’ Was this on the day of the wedding?’
Mother-in-law: ‘Yes. We had a lot of fun trying to spot your car we drove around for a couple of hours. I am still upset you forgot to tell us where you were staying.’
On my wedding night, my mother-in-law: tried to barge in and ruin our evening. I was so taken aback at the time, I didn’t say anything else.”
But They Did Not Want Her There
“Our wedding was great, but we didn’t spend a lot of money on it so we’d have money left for our dream honeymoon. We planned two weeks of bliss in France. We live in the Netherlands, so we’d decided to drive to Paris. We took the very, very scenic route, spent a few nights in hotels across the country, went to tastings and little restaurants, and ended up with a week in Paris before we drove back. It was wonderfully, awfully cliché, and lovey-dovey.
The first day in Paris, we were having dinner in a ridiculously expensive and fantastic restaurant. Out of the blue, my husband got a phone call. Surprise! It’s his mother. She wanted to come surprise us because we’d ‘made it obvious we secretly wanted her there by not letting her babysit our daughter.’ Yeah, try following that logic for a second. But her little plan didn’t work out; she drove for four hours straight and got a flat tire. In the middle of nowhere, in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. She can’t change a tire, and she never bothered to learn how. So what did she do? Did she call roadside assistance? Call a local garage? Accept help from the people who stopped to offer? Of course not. She called my husband and expected him to come to get her.
My husband was so flabbergasted his filter malfunctioned. So he told her mom she was an idiot, of course, we didn’t want her around in the freaking city of love, and we didn’t let her babysit our daughter because we wanted her to enjoy those two weeks with a friend her own age and not be bored to death, and she paid for roadside assistance so she should call them so she could go home again. Then he hung up, switched off his phone, and ordered more food. The next day, we noticed six sad and angry voicemails, the last one saying she’d made it home.
Despite her pathetic little sabotage attempt, we had an awesome honeymoon, and we were on cloud nine for months after.”
“I Lost My Freaking Mind”
“My husband and I took a long time to get to the whole married thing. Mostly because we were young and broke as heck, and I had stipulated early on in the relationship that I wouldn’t consider marrying him until we had lived together for at least two years. When we did finally set a date, all heck broke loose.
My mother-in-law had been planning a ‘family vacation’ right around our wedding date. They weren’t leaving until a few days after our actual ceremony, so it shouldn’t have impacted anything. But by the months’ worth of moaning, you’d have thought we’d made her give up her firstborn child or something. My husband and I had spent years saving up for our honeymoon and were stoked to finally get to go somewhere together without friends or family around, as we’d never actually had a vacation just the two of us before. Plans were made, deposits were paid, plane tickets were booked.
The day before our wedding, my husband gets a phone call. He went into the other room and came back about 10 minutes later, looking like he’d seen a ghost. His mother had called, too excited to keep the ‘surprise; to herself. She had completely changed their plans, and would now be going on our honeymoon with us, with the rest of the family for their family vacation. And it was ok, we could save money and cancel our reservations and just stay in the second bed in their hotel room. And they’d totally gotten the seats next to us on our flight so we’d be plane buddies!
I lost my freaking mind.
I called my parents in hysterical tears. We couldn’t afford to change our plans, and I couldn’t stand being around this crazy dumpster fire. My parents, who had just paid for the entirety of our over-budget wedding, were appalled enough by my mother-in-law’s way out of line planning that they stepped in on our behalf. My mom, queen of the online coupon, booked us new everything. And the shiny little gem on top of this…she did it all on a completely different island than the one my mother-in-law was going to. Then, by some miracle, we were able to recover most of the initial deposits we’d paid on our ‘original’ honeymoon booking.
Keep in mind, all of this happened less than 18 hours before our wedding day.
The wedding itself had its own issues, and we went home knowing that the worst was more or less over. We got up at the butt-crack of dawn to book it down to the airport for our new flight and napped through the whole thing. When we disembarked and turned our cellphones back on, we both had been bombarded with messages. See, the ‘original’ flight was scheduled for several hours after the new one, and my mother-in-law was still expecting us for that. Whoops. Looks like we’d missed the flight. Oh well!
My husband shot off a text saying we’d catch up with them later. We never did tell them where we were until after we got back, but I don’t think my mother-in-law ever figured out what happened. Apparently, we just kept barely missing each other on that vacation. Even though we were on completely different islands. Geography is not a strong point for that family.”
Of Crouse, There’s A Catch
“My mother-in-law is a bit of a ‘bless her heart’ case. She generally means well, but she has no awareness of boundaries. It’s an open debate whether she’s genuinely clueless or if she’s incredibly calculating. I swing between them.
We call her ‘Eeyore’ because whilst she’s kind, there’s always an element of negativity that comes along with it. She can never allow herself to just be happy, and she invariably brings everyone else down with her. She also has a raging Martyr Complex which has caused quite a bit of resentment in the family. I’ve shut down her nonsense from the start so she tends to rein in her boundary stomping with me, but now and then she’ll test the fences for weakness.
Background sorted, on to the story.
My mother-in-law asked my then-fiancé and me about our honeymoon plans. We mentioned that we’d love to travel around [country] but it was out of our budget.
‘We can pay! It’s our wedding gift to you!’ She exclaimed excitedly.
Fiancé and I exchanged glances- we don’t like to accept money from them as it usually has very long strings attached, but for our dream honeymoon, we may have been prepared to take our chances.
‘We can get an R.V., and spend six weeks out there like we did when Fiancé was young! It’ll be a family trip down memory lane. Let me get our old itinerary out, it’s in a scrapbook, we can start booking,’ she said excitedly.
Six weeks. In an RV. With my in-laws. Reliving a holiday they took with my fiancé when he was 12. FOR OUR HONEYMOON.
.We politely declined her ‘wedding gift.'”
“I Know Is This Her Intention”
“For whatever reason, my mother-in-law refuses to go on vacation without my husband (her son). She says she has no interest in going anywhere with my father-in-law, as they’ve been married a long time and have done enough together. (Wish I was joking). Suddenly her tune has changed. And I began to wonder why. Well, my husband told her what resort we would be going to for our honeymoon. My mother-in-law and father-in-law have a milestone anniversary a few weeks after our wedding. Before I knew it, she was booking a trip to the same location. She asked us what dates we were picking for our honeymoon because she ‘wanted to make sure she doesn’t come during our honeymoon.’
She kept saying this ON REPEAT. My husband saw it as her doing the right thing and wanting to make sure she doesn’t impose. I know better. She keeps repeating it because she is hoping he will say, ‘Oh if we overlap by a day or two it’s no big deal mom.’
I KNOW IN MY GUT this is her intention. My husband does not agree and thinks I’m just bias because of her previous behavior. I’ve now decided we will be choosing a totally different resort for our honeymoon.”
They Never Knew Peace On Their Honeymoon
“My mother-in-law was such a nightmare. When we were preparing to leave for the airport for the honeymoon, we get a call from my sister-in-law in hysterics, saying we had to get to the hospital NOW. My mother-in-law put herself in the hospital to try to stop him from leaving on our honeymoon.
We got to the emergency room in rapid.
‘Looks like your wife will have to go on the honeymoon without you!’ is how my mother-in-law gleefully put it. I didn’t, to her obvious dismay. After several hours, the doctor told her that all her tests came back normal so she could go home. She then fake-faints. It was such a bad acting job, with hand fluttering to her forehead and swooning. We all just stood there staring at her. The doctor didn’t even move to check on her as it was so obvious.
She miraculously ‘comes to,’ and asked what happened, did she just faint? Clearly, she was not well enough to go home. I don’t know how she did it but she convinced the doctor to keep her on 24-hour hold for observation. We missed our flight, so we changed it to the next day, as well as our hotel and car hire. My sister-in-law would not stop screaming at us how our union was ‘killing’ her mother, and how my husband had to stay to look after their mother since it was all his fault for marrying me.
The next day, we stopped into the hospital on our way to the airport. The doctor and nurses are clearly annoyed, telling my mother-in-law she has to leave the hospital as nothing is wrong with her and they have discharged her. She was fighting tooth and nail to stay in hospital. She was throwing a tantrum in the room, refusing to get dressed.
The doctor was long gone at this point, and the poor nurse looked at us and firmly says, ‘You need to get her dressed and get her home.’
I have had enough at this point. I put my foot down and tell my husband I was leaving with or without him for the honeymoon. My mother-in-law had a look of triumphant winning on her face as clearly, she ‘won’ and her son would of course choose mummy over the wife.
My husband put me before her, telling her he was leaving, regardless of her staying in hospital or not. She wailed some more about ‘how could he do this to her’ and how she was.
My father-in-law turned to us and said, ‘Just leave.’
He clearly had enough, too. We leave and have a fantastic honeymoon, undisturbed.
Haha, yeah right.
She was blowing up my husband’s phone from the moment we left the hospital. When he turned his phone off, she then started ringing the hotel, leaving messages at the front desk FOR WHEN WE CHECKED IN. His sister also joined in on incessantly trying to contact him to scream at him. This did not stop for the entire trip. We probably received about 5-10 calls a day from the combined. It was such a stressful nightmare that we ended up fighting for much of our honeymoon.”
“It Was Wrong Of Her To Shame Us For Our Honeymoon”
“My husband and I bought one of those cheesy, Instagram-worthy Polaroid cameras to take photos from our wedding and events for our photo album. We have a bunch of fun photos from our wedding. After the wedding, my husband and I left for our honeymoon night at our hotel. The next day we had for just us. We decided to get a couples massage.
The hotel we stayed at was gorgeous and right on the water. The massage we booked included a private thirty-minute bath before the massage. So we go, the wonderful staff had drawn a bath for us with rose petals and it was stunning! My husband and I both have never wasted money on just things like this so it was a real treat!
The bathtub was settled in the center of the room with a huge, floor to ceiling window overlooking the water. So I got into the tub and leaned on the edge of it, looking out the window. I hear my husband call to me, ‘Wait, don’t move!’ And the snap of the Polaroid. He rushed over to show me and the photo was stunning. Sure, it revealed a lot of my bare body, but we decided it would just be for us.
We had a magical time at the hotel. But that evening we had to return to my parents’ house to get ready to leave for our home overseas. But as we’re leaving, my husband got a call from his mother. She cries and whines, wanting for all of us to meet at her rental home for a family dinner. We begrudgingly agreed and headed over. We all ate dinner and tried to have a nice time. After dinner, I left to use the restroom.
But because this is my mother-in-law is who she is, something bad had to happen. I was dumb and left my purse on the kitchen counter and who snooped?? My mother-in-law, of course! As I was washing my hands, I heard shrieking. So, I dried my hands and quickly went to go see what all the fuss was about.
I walked into the kitchen to see my mother-in-law hanging off of my husband crying and shrieking, ‘What is this?? What’s the meaning of this??’
I rolled my eyes and calmly asked what was going on. She yelled at me, ‘This marriage is over!! It’s over!! Get out! You lady of the night!’
I got offended and tried to ask what the heck was going on. All of my laws have jumped into the conversation at this point, trying to solve the situation. It’s a bit of chaos.
Finally, my mother-in-law shoves the photo in my husband’s face.
‘What is the meaning of this??’ my mother-in-law angrily questioned.
My husband blushes and explains to her it was a private photo from our honeymoon.
The entire family got embarrassed and moved away when my mother-in-law tried to show them the Polaroid. My sister-in-law chimed in saying it’s not their right to see our private lives, and it was wrong of her to be shaming us for our honeymoon.
And just like that, with no support from the family, my mother-in-law tried to play it off as a huge joke!
‘Oh, did you guys think I was serious? Teehee!’ she said with a giggle.
I was still fuming, so I snatch the picture back, grab my purse, thanked my husband’s family for hosting, and left. My husband followed me behind rather quickly and after twenty minutes in the car, we laughed it off.”
She Does Not Pass The Vibe Check
Well, as most have had, we have had a tough year. I recently got sick and was out of work for about one and a half months. During that time, my wife had to go to a hospital for her chronic depression, and she’s lost her job since March and can’t find another. Needless to say, we aren’t rolling in the dough. The only reason we took a vacation in July was because we were determined to have a honeymoon, as we got married in January. It was a beautiful wedding, and we were excited to finally celebrate our lives together.
Well, Christmas was getting closer and closer. I had been trying to scrape together money for weeks for presents, but we’ve had major issues with funds. So we decided we couldn’t make the trip to see my in-laws during Christmas. Instead, I suggested she go without me so we wouldn’t have to board the animals or pay anyone to watch them, which is the majority of the cost.
When my wife called to inform them of this, she was berated with intrusive questions. Everyone was saying they can’t believe it was because we couldn’t afford it, and questioning whether I was doing this because I didn’t like them.
‘I feel a bit snubbed!’ Her mother said.
Well, forget you, lady. Forget you very much. I worked hard and just barely have the money to send my wife there between everything we have had to do to the car (new tires, oil change) to get it ready for the trip. And you’re feeling snubbed? I’ve done all I can and there’s no path forward on saving money this year! I was working 50 hours a week at that point, and was still not making what I wanted to!
The worst part was for the last three years, I had given up Christmas with my family to be with my wife’s family! I did not see the issue if I had just wanted to spend one Christmas with mine! I was so frustrated with this self-centered woman born with a spoon up her butt, and no concept of being unable to afford to do something for one year. It’s dumb. I just want to smack her.”
