[Mordred]

I’ve been dating this girl, S, for almost five years. She’s a friendly, independent, accepting, caring, dependable, observant, trustworthy, cheerful, intelligent, loving, silly, patient, kind, sympathetic person, and both of us want to spend our lives with the other.
The issue came in when I had asked her father for permission to marry her a few months ago–he and her mother are both extremely opposed to the idea of us being together, just because I’m Pagan. They won’t listen to me when I try to explain that being Pagan doesn’t mean I’m a ‘devil-worshipper.’ They said they’d reconsider if I converted to Christianity, but I’m not willing to give up my beliefs for [i]them[/i].
Anyway, last Wednesday, S showed up at my apartment in tears because her parents are trying to get her to marry a guy who goes to their church. He’s also one of my co-workers, and I’ll just call him T.
T is a violent, hostile, insensitive, irresponsible, unreliable, overdramatic son of a bitch, and he’s been intolerably smug over how her parents favour him over me.
S’s parents refuse to have any further discussion with me, and I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

[April Masini, your AskApril]

When you ask a question, there are a variety of answers you may get. One of them is a yes and one is a no, and of course there are many others in between. It sounds as if you don’t like the answer you got when you asked her parents for their approval to marry their daughter. 😕

I don’t know about the culture in which you live, but if you need parents approval for marriage, it seems that over the course of the five years of dating her, you would have been wooing them, too — since you needed three yes answers for a proposal, not just one. It’s hard to imagine that their response, after knowing them for as many years as you have, has come as a surprise. However, now that you have their response, you can try winning them over or you can decide to try to win her over without her parents approval or you can accept the three no’s and just move on. It seems like those are your options.

And if you do move on, and you’re dating within a culture where parent approval is necessary, make sure you’re wooing all three of the people you need approval from to marry next time. It’s a shame that it took five years to get to this point — but at least it didn’t take 10!

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