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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=92063

Gods, but this is harsh. I thought people like her only existed in romantic comedies. The girl may be ill-mannered but it's not like she's a chav. To top it off, the mother-in-law sent it THREE times.

I'd say that the future mother in law showed a great deal of restraint in keeping her correspondence private. Her future daughter in law was a guest in her home and acted very disrespectfully and rude. The only sad part of this is the ease in which the bride to be was able to spread it. It would have been more appropriate to send a hand written letter rather than an email.

It sounds like the daughter in law, and her family, are just I don't know what the word is. The kind of people you just stare at in disbelief at what they consider to be ok behavior. However, FMiL should have talked to the woman in private. Not only would it have not gotten out like this, but she would also have been able to explain herself better.

I can't stand rude house guests and my family is not at all posh and/or hoity toity. The one thing people do that I will never understand is go to my fridge and stare into it. What the hell? I would never do that at someone else's house. Ever. Not even a family member's. Just getting that out (not trying to derail the thread, Espy.)

I think the proper response there would simply be never go to the future mother-in-law's house again. Some of those complaints are possibly valid, like staying in bed late into the morning, but to make such a big deal out of them is... yeah.

Alternatively, go to the mother-in-law's house often, and show her what real poor manners are.

If the accusations are true then the young lady is rude. She's not the worst ever, but there are some legitimate complaints in there. The mother was just as rude to send such a nasty email, though. They are both in the wrong.

I think the future mother-in-law should have talked to her son's intended rather than email her. However, I also think it sounds like this woman was a rude guest at the future mother-in-law's house. The only one I find even mildly acceptable is her sleeping later than the rest of the household and then if it was done on the first day or with good reason (illness or being out late). I would never go to someone else's home and say I won't eat what they have as a meal or help myself to seconds without them being offered. That's terrible manners. What's worse is that the fiancee went to a local pub and said some not-so-nice things about her future family. Who does that and then expects to be accepted with open arms? I'm sure the future mother-in-law got an earful from her acquaintances. I know I wouldn't appreciate that type of behavior from a woman who wants to marry my son.

Apparently, the girl is diabetic, which could explain the food thing. And the mom apparently considers herself part of 'The Queen's Set.' The entire unedited e-mail also has the mom scolding the girl for talking about her condition, saying it is vulgar and that she is being an attention-whore. She also says she pities her son and, one could uncharitably infer, accuses the girl of being a gold-digger. Maybe the girl isn't very 'mannered,' but the mother-in-law really sounds like a snobby bitch.
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Also seems partly like a case of 'no one is good enough for my son.'

I agree that now seeing that she is diabetic changes the food thing quite a bit, including saying she didn't have enough food. It also makes the future mother-in-law seem more like an asshat.

Having a disease does not excuse bad manners, it only prompts further effort on planning and communication.

Oh, I didn't even see the letter because I read it this morning. The one posted in that article is not complete (despite what they say). Here's the complete version:

It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.​

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you.​

It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.​

Your behaviour on your visit to Devon during April was staggering in its uncouthness and lack of grace.​

Unfortunately, this was not the first example of bad manners I have experienced from you.​

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste.​

There are plenty of finishing schools around. You would be an ideal candidate for the Ladette to Lady television series.​

Please, for your own good, for Freddie's sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.​

Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:​

When you are a guest in another's house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat - unless you are positively allergic to something.​

You do not remark that you do not have enough food.​

You do not start before everyone else.​

You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.​

When a guest in another's house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early - you fall in line with house norms.​

You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.​

I have no idea whether you wrote to thank [your future sister-in-law] for the weekend but you should have hand-written a card to her.​

You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed at Houndspool.​

[Your future sister-in-law] has quite the most exquisite manners of anyone I have ever come across. You would do well to follow her example.​

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.​

It is tragic that you have diabetes. However, you aren't the only young person in the world who is a diabetic.​

I know quite a few young people who have this condition, one of whom is getting married in June. I have never heard her discuss her condition. She quietly gets on with it. She doesn't like being diabetic. Who would? You do not need to regale everyone with the details of your condition or use it as an excuse to draw attention to yourself. It is vulgar.​

As a diabetic of long standing you must be acutely aware of the need to prepare yourself for extraordinary eventualities, the walk to Mothecombe beach being an example.You are experienced enough to have prepared yourself appropriately.​

No-one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.​

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters' marriages.)​

If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.​

One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.​

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I put the extra "snobby bitch" parts in bold.

Clearly the mother cannot communicate with her son or she would have use another alternative, it is sad that this woman allowed this private email to go on the net. I don't blame the mother one bit for her reaction and quite frankly I'm sympathetic to her. What is classless is taking this family matter and sharing it with people OUTSIDE her family. Unacceptable.

Are some of the points moot? Absolutely. However, some others do make sense. Discuss it. Try to understand one another. Don't put this on the internet. How foolish and how bad you look since basically it pretty much sums up that the mother was right all along.

One of the points in particular that I agree with... is that I dislike when someone speaks of a medical condition at length especially when having a meal with them or hanging out with them. It is awkward and honestly pigeon-holes me to pretend I give a shit. "Oh you have acute asma?" *nod* /end of discussion. Thanks for the details. Don't need to hear you talk about it over supper and expect a "YOU POOR THING THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND YOU" reaction from me.

She also sees that this future member of the family is clearly of the upbringing of "cater to me, I'm a beautiful princess" attention whore who's expecting a lavish wedding to bankrupt herself (and most importantly on her fiancee's and fiancee's family) to get that dream wedding. Especially when her own family can't share shit in the cost. she obviously doesn't want her son to live as a pauper the day after his wedding.

That's my take.

I, David Nihsen, wholly and completely agree with Jay. The points in the letter range from spot on to a bit on the absurd and the way that they are communicated is not in the best of voice. But all that pales in comparison to the fact that this woman took a private email and sent it out into the wild for ridicule and derision.

Freddie now has to choose between his mother and his bride-to-be as they will never get along.

Let me put it another way. These people are of a certain perceived social strata. In comes this woman who is not of that strata and acts like it. The mother sends an email to instruct the girl (albeit in a snobbish way) as to what is expected. For this she is made as a target of mockery.

Let's change it up a bit. Say your son or daughter finds a mate. They bring them to your house and act as if they are on some sort of episode of America's Worst Rednecks. Same thing. Boorish behavior that does not fit the social situation is looked down on and you would be well within your rights to attempt to set the expectations. Now, it would have been better to leave out the parts about finishing schools or that she wasn't apparently good enough for her boy, but that's neither here nor there.

I side for the mom on this one, mostly because of the actions of the future (?) DIL after the fact.

i will say this and you will all hate me for it. I PERSONALLY believe you should say nothing to anyone you do not want seen in public. was it bullshit for the girl to do? yes hell yes. but once you speak be ready to defend your viewpoint in good or bad light. this is the same kind of shit that circles the toilet in workplaces.

I find nothing that the mother mentioned in her letter to be rude.

That's how people act here. I find it really weird.

LittleSin said:

I find nothing that the mother mentioned in her letter to be rude.

That's how people act here. I find it really weird.

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I agree with sin. Of course, we don't know what actually transpired at the dinner, but nothing the mother ranted about seemed like any reason to drop your monocle in your tea.

I'm gonna put this simply: fuck that dumb ol' bitch, and it's so funny that everyone gets to read it now. What the hell was up with that shit? Some people have a huge rod up their ass.

The BBC, in true British style, has an analysis of the email and whether the mother-in-law's criticisms were valid:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13973331

Though even the BBC's interviewees agree that while some of the criticisms might be justified, the mother-in-law acted like a huge front bottom.

The only one I really disagreed with was the finishing school one. That was a bit snarky. The girl sounds rude to me and if someone acted that way at my house I would think she was very rude. I wouldn't say anything though, I guess, unless it was family.

Although sometimes the reason people go on being rude is they have no idea they are being rude. I think family is obligated to help family with stuff like that. I wouldn't say anything to guests that were just visiting for a short time who won't be visiting again mostly because after that crap I wouldn't invite them.

I'm going to point out that the wedding is befitting their income level. From what little information is out there, it doesn't sound lavish at all. They're a solidly middle-class couple living in an affluent suburb. They're not renting out a castle; they're renting a hall within the castle, much like any other couple rents out a banquet hall. The girl's parents aren't contributing much because they both lost their jobs without warning, with only the girl's mother just recently finding work again.

It was stupid of the girl to send out the e-mail to her friends, but it's also entirely predictable. She gets an e-mail from her future MIL getting all up in her shit, you think she isn't going to share that with her best friends? Are you kidding me? You'd expect her to know better, but it's also easy to judge an emotional situation from the outside looking in. Equally stupid (and kind of funny, given the MIL's insistence on manners and hand-written correspondence) for the mother to do this kind of thing via e-mail, although I wouldn't expect a 60-year old to be familiar with the possible consequences.

Everything else is a matter of perspective on each party's part, so it's tough to have an opinion about it. Was she being an ill-mannered attention whore, or is that just how the MIL saw it? Who the heck knows? All that can really be said is they done both fucked up.

I will say, however, that I find it tough to take the MIL all that seriously when she claims the girl's behavior caused the family dog to become "profoundly upset, depressed and anxious."

I would say I agree with drifter, but since he uses colored font, and I use a dark background, I've never been able to read anything he posts.

Thanks for the heads up; I had no idea I changed the font color.

Makare, exactly. Sometimes people are just dumb, not being rude. Instead of calling the naive girl a stupid vapid cunt with no manners, maybe use some helpful cues to get her adjusted. I mean, for fuck's sake, really, you don't ask for seconds until the host asks you? If I don't follow this, am I a rude, pompous sniveling bitch?

BETTER GO TO FINISHING SCHOOL, OH MY

I don't remember the exact old saying, but you don't spread shit outside the family. If you have criminal-level problems, well of course, but this shit? Why would you spread this around? It's only going to make you look bad too.

And as with Dave, I agree with Jay.

pfft! that is nothing. I should see if my wife still got some email from her mother to ME.

Dave said:

I, David Nihsen, wholly and completely agree with Jay. The points in the letter range from spot on to a bit on the absurd and the way that they are communicated is not in the best of voice. But all that pales in comparison to the fact that this woman took a private email and sent it out into the wild for ridicule and derision.

Freddie now has to choose between his mother and his bride-to-be as they will never get along.

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Never ever?

I'll have to agree that forwarding this email was just as bad. The girl seems classless but I can understand her family being offended.

tldr summary: Ha! I'm not going to summarize this! Read it or not, I don't care. I suppose you can skip to the numbered points near the bottom if you hate reading...

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Meh. The girl surely knew what she was getting into when she became engaged, and to what society her MIL felt her husband-to-be's family belonged to.

If the MIL didn't want to get along with the girl, she would not have sent the note. As offensive as the note may seem, the MIL is actually trying to reach out and say, "Look. I don't approve of this, but I'm trying to make the best of it. I have high expectations for guests, and if you want to be a guest in my home in the future, you'll attend to these expectations. If not, that's fine - your choice, but I'm not planning on lowering my expectations simply because my son married you."

It's not nice, sure. Does it need to be?

However, for the girl to then air it publicly is truly shocking behavior - a personal affront to the person who sent it.

As far as people saying it's ok for a diabetic to wait until the meal starts before explaining that they have special needs - that's ludicrous. You communicate your needs regarding the food long before the meal so that your host can prepare for you.

For informal gatherings where there's a lots of choices, sure, don't bother telling me, you can pick and choose when you get here, and I always have something left over from some previous meal that I can reheat in the microwave.

But if I invite you over for an evening dinner party, require RSVPs, and so forth, and you tell me that you're allergic to dairy products once I set the soup in front of you, I suddenly have to change most of my meal plan for you, on the fly, and I spent days preparing for this. Suddenly you have to quiz me on everything I set in front of you, and a significant portion of the mealtime discussion regards whether you can eat something or not. Had you instead relayed your needs to me several days in advance - ideally with the RSVP - then I would have designed the meal not only so your needs could be met, but so your meal wouldn't have to be significantly different than others, and no one would feel like they were given more or less, or better or worse, than any other person, and best of all, the whole discussion could be about more interesting matters than your health.

I think a lot of people are assuming that it was a last-minute meal thrown together on a whim for already close family and friends, served family style.

Perhaps, instead, this was an invitation only dinner to meet the fiance of the son, and that this woman went all out to impress her new son's fiance and provide a space and time to get to know her. The fiance's actions instead forced the meal plan to be changed at the last second, and the woman's behavior elsewhere showed a significant lack of respect for her host's effort and (hopefully good) intentions.

Rising with the household, for instance, gives people more time to talk over the morning meal and spend time together. I'm quite certain that the host said, "We arise at 7 and morning meal is served at 8" or somesuch, so that she not only had that information, but she knew the host had expectations that she would join them. She should have told her then if she planned on arising later, or needed to have a special meal set aside for her at a different time. Waking up early one day won't kill you, but chances are the girl simply wanted to avoid spending time with them, or perhaps was embarrassed by the evening meal and simply wanted to avoid a breakfast repeat. (which probably wouldn't have happened, now that the host knew more about her needs - she may have spent some time that evening making sure the next days meals would be ok)

If the woman doesn't want any part of that semi-regal lifestyle, that's fine, but she shouldn't accept invitations if she's not going to play the same game. She should have instead reversed it and invited them to visit her for an evening meal if she wanted to have it on her terms.

1) What she did at the host's house wasn't intrinsically wrong - it was merely the wrong time and place to act that way.
2) What the MIL did in sending her that note could probably have been conveyed better - it shows a distinct lack of respect for the fiance, but even the upper class know that you show more respect to the people who least deserve it.
3) Releasing that private communication for public ridicule vastly outweighs any personal affront she could possibly have made during the visit.

I serve all my meals family style, regardless of who's coming, and my only expectation is that you don't throw food until someone else has thrown food at you.

It's not nice, sure. Does it need to be?

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Yes. If you are lecturing someone on rude behavior and how to properly interact with others, then the message itself needs to be polite. Otherwise you're just being a hypocrite.

The Bourne Family
Putting the hoity in the toity since 1373.

Also agreeing with Sin, not a whole lot of the list seems like anything out of the normal to me. The whole thing seems largely subjective, like how it depends on the household if it's rude to take your shoes off or rude to walk inside WITHOUT taking them off. With most of my family it's considered a rude insult to the chef and waste of food if you DON'T help yourself to second helpings.

Or when there's a guest in our house, we let them sleep until whenever they feel like getting up. None of this "this is an early-rising household" bullshit.

That said, when you're a guest in somebody's home you DO make an effort to follow their rules, but it sounds like the FMIL could have made a better effort to explain what was expected without coming across as a "you're not good enough for my son" snob. The fDil also didn't need to share the email with the world, so I'm in the "both in the wrong" camp.

David said:

Also agreeing with Sin, not a whole lot of the list seems like anything out of the normal to me. The whole thing seems largely subjective, like how it depends on the household if it's rude to take your shoes off or rude to walk inside WITHOUT taking them off. With most of my family it's considered a rude insult to the chef and waste of food if you DON'T help yourself to second helpings.

Or when there's a guest in our house, we let them sleep until whenever they feel like getting up. None of this "this is an early-rising household" bullshit.

That said, when you're a guest in somebody's home you DO make an effort to follow their rules, but it sounds like the FMIL could have made a better effort to explain what was expected without coming across as a "you're not good enough for my son" snob. The fDil also didn't need to share the email with the world, so I'm in the "both in the wrong" camp.

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Yea. This is not a rude letter IMO

but the son should have brief his future bride on the house rules. So it is the guy's fault this time around (unless she didn't listen then that is a different story)

Chibibar said:

but the son should have brief his future bride on the house rules. So it is the guy's fault this time around (unless she didn't listen then that is a different story)

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The beginning of the letter is spent with the MIL deriding the son and her ability to reason with him. It may be an indirect attack on the girl he chose to marry, or it could be that he's still acting out against his mom, or that he truly is a bumbling fool.

or maybe he just isnt a hoity toity like his mother and rest of family?

I just want to add that I misread the title initially and thought this was about a brutal letter from the future and I was expecting some interesting satirical fiction. I was disappoint.

makare said:

I just want to add that I misread the title initially and thought this was about a brutal letter from the future and I was expecting some interesting satirical fiction. I was disappoint.

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That would have been a much more interesting thread, actually.

The next question is, is the wedding still on?

If FMIL is footing the bill... I doubt it will still be held in a castle.