This title goes to my dad (remember my post about helping me with gift ideas for him?). We don't get along all the time, but I try. I genuinely try to have a relationship with him, even if it never works out.
He wanted to pay for food and desert for our wedding. He's helped me financially before (such as for college) and it was never an issue. In fact it's a way for me to include him in something so that tends to be the only time we get along.
I told him about which caterers we were interested in, showed him their menus, invited him to the tasting, he spoke with the caterer in person, crunched numbers, helped decide on the food, etc. It was fun, and it went well. He pushed me to add more to our menu and said I should order whichever thing I wanted. Would not give me any sort of budget or limit. Even tried to get me to choose the more expensive cut of beef, but I'm really budget conscious and was careful to keep it all under control. He looked at the final numbers, said it was good, said it was way less than he expected, signed the contract, paid the deposit, everything was cool. Alright! (This was about 5 months ago).
Last weekend, he chose which bakery he wanted to get our desserts from. Since I don't care much about the desserts and neither does FI, and since my dad is paying for this, we didn't mind. It's a good bakery anyway, but it's pricey. We had everything picked out and had the final price estimate, and then suddenly my dad decides to add a TON more stuff to our order, which increased the price by a couple hundred dollars. FI and I did not want this, it was not necessary, but again my dad wanted to pay for it and he knew the cost, so fine. Go ahead.
We go to lunch after the bakery, and the SECOND we sit down my dad pounces on me. He was pissed about the cost. He was bombarding me with somewhat hostile questions such as "How much do you think I'm going to spend on this wedding? How much is the food going to cost? Why do you think you can spend whatever you want? Exactly how much money are you trying to get out of me?" Then he starts flat-out insulting me with the way I handle money, accusing me of just spending frivolously without a care in the world, and blowing all his money on nonsense, and said he wouldn't give me another penny and didn't want to pay for anything. Um... what? He was the one that chose everything. He was the one who tried to get me to spend MORE and I was constantly worrying about the budget and tracking costs on a huge spreadsheet I made. He was the one who added 20+ people to the guest list, even after I argued a million times that this was going to add to the costs, especially for food because it's per person. He wanted to be larger than life.
The thing is, he has a HUGE ego and thinks he's a local celebrity, so this was a chance for him to show off. He wants a huge elaborate dessert display, and he wants to brag to all his friends that he spent a fortune on it for his spoiled brat daughter. He wants the big show, but I'm sure after he thought about the actual money figures, he had a panicked moment and took it out on me.
After his blow-up at lunch, FI and I looked over our budget again. We could pay for the food and dessert ourselves if we scale back and cut the guest list a little. We've been extremely careful with our money and are paying for the majority of the wedding ourselves. So I e-mailed my parents and let them know that FI and I have thought about it and we'd like to take the burden of cost away from them by paying for food and dessert ourselves. OMG my dad flipped the fuck out. It was a huge insult to him. He wanted to pay.
So I said "well you seemed very concerned about the cost at lunch the other day. So if you still want to pay that's really nice of you, but let me call the caterer and bakery to scale things back a little. It'll save a few hundred dollars at least." OH NO! No, no, no! I will NOT scale back! (Because he needs the big elaborate display to show off. This is the man who was on the brink of bankruptcy several years ago and had 40 live lobsters flown in from Maine and threw a huge pool party for all his friends and each person got their own steamed lobster).
Then my mom jumped in and went on a whole tangent about how they want to help us even MORE with wedding stuff, and would like to pay for invitations (yeah this is NOT happening. It's not worth the stress.) But I decided to call my dad on his bs and I said "Then let's scale back on the dessert. If we do X, it'll save over $200 which is enough to cover invitations and postage." Again, this wasn't my real plan, I just wanted to call him on his bs. I'm paying for the invitations and postage myself, regardless of what they say.
My dad got pissed again. He said "No, I'll just give you an extra $200 for that when you need it." Nope!
Me: "Dad I'm not asking you for more money. What I'm saying is I'm trying to stick to a budget here. We can use the funds you've already made available to us and re-allocate them in a more useful way in order to cover more things that are important."
My dad: "No." lol, ok.
So I try to control costs and he ignores me and goes over the top. Then attacks me for spending too much money. Then won't allow me to scale back to save money. His idea of a budget is if you have $500 to spend on 3 things, you spend all $500 on the first thing and then get more money for the other two things and end up spending $1,200 cuz it's all about appearances, and then blame someone else for blowing the budget.
I guess I don't need advice on this one because I know how he is. He's an extremely complicated person to deal with. I just thought since he was so involved in the food and desserts from the get-go and had a say in all of it, that it would all be fine. Especially since in the past the financial stuff with him was always fine, and in this case getting him involved was a good way for us to do something together and "bond."
I just wanted to share and vent about how fucking impossible he is. It's really damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is nothing I can do because no matter what, he'll be mad. If I don't let him pay apparently he'll also be really hurt and offended. But since he's always been like this, I'm also kind of used to it so I just have to shrug it off and ignore him. I swear I should have pursued my psychology career and my entire PhD thesis could have been on him. This is not even the tip of the iceberg of how nuts he is. Anyway. Sorry this post is super long. I'm done with my vent now.