AITA for getting married in the same year as my stepdaughter?
Me (f35) married my partner (m66) last year and now his daughter won’t speak to us.
Bit of a back story. I met my partner 6 years ago after getting divorced. His daughter got engaged in 2023 and a few months later, my partner proposed to me (this was our second marriage). When we got engaged, she never said congratulations but instead said please don’t get married before we. We understood as it is her first wedding and should be a day to remember (I thought my first marriage was going to be forever so I get it). We agreed even though she didn’t want to get married for two years! We didn’t want to wait that long as we didn’t want a big wedding, just close family and for it to more of a celebration that we found love again. It was a good excuse for our families to meet each other. She booked her wedding for April 2025. Every time we saw her we would ask about the wedding planning and offer any support. She never once asked how our wedding planning was going, but that was ok. We also contributed a large amount to her wedding with no say. We booked our wedding for December 2025. In February 2025, our venue cancelled as they were no longer doing weddings. We were gutted. We looked around but all the venues were really expensive and we just didn’t want to spend a lot of money as this was our second marriage. Anyway, we attended her wedding obviously and it was beautiful. We were so happy for her. I’m aware that there is an age gap between me and her dad so we never have public displays of affection and I was super polite to her mom and her new partner. Anyway, after lots of discussions about venues and money, we decided to elope. We got married in July 2025 with two random witnesses off the street. Just us. No white dress, no bridesmaids, no venue, no photos nothing. We didn’t want to steal any thunder or spotlight from step daughter but we also didn’t want to wait any longer, we had already waited 2 years for her to get married. My partner has some serious health issues and we wanted to get married whilst he could still “walk down the aisle”. We thought going off on our own wouldn’t steal any spotlight. Was it the wedding we wanted? No. But we thought it was the best way to keep everyone else happy. I didn’t even have my own children there. Anyway, when we told his children, they were all so pleased, except the daughter that got married in April. She deleted us off social media and left the group chat. We sent a message explaining that we purposely didn’t have a big wedding so as not to steal any spotlight but her response was… you got married in the same year as me and I will never forgive you. A note. She knew the original wedding was going to be in December which is still the same year and didn’t seem to have an issue with that. I hate the fact my partner has pretty much lost contact with his daughter and I feel really guilty but also don’t see how I stole any thunder.
Based on some comments on another post, I few things to clarify. I was divorced for 12 months before I met my partner. He had been divorced for 13 years so no families were broken up.
My partner is not wealthy. He doesn’t own his own house and very limited savings and this is not a marriage for money. I am in fact the main earner. My wages cover our rent and bills. The money for the step daughters wedding was probably 60% me and 40% my partner but we never see money like that. My wages and his small state pension get paid into a joint account and bills come out of that. So it’s not a money marriage, the man just makes me smile. His health issue is mobility not life threatening.
So AITA?