My Future Mil Handed Me A 60-page Prenup At Our Rehearsal Dinner. It Forbade Me From Gaining 20 Lbs Or I’d Lose My Future Kids. I Walked Out, But Should I Have Fought For Him?

Finding New Ground

The following week Talia convinced me to try something completely new. She said I needed to meet people outside of my existing circles, get involved in activities that had nothing to do with work or the wedding or any of that drama.

She’d joined a recreational volleyball league that played on Wednesday nights and thought I should come try it out. I told her I was terrible at volleyball and hadn’t played since high school gym class but she said that was the whole point.

It was recreational, not competitive, and the team was friendly and just wanted to have fun. I showed up to the first practice feeling awkward and out of place.

The team was a mix of people in their 20s and 30s, some who were decent at volleyball and some who were as bad as me. We did drills and scrimmages for 2 hours and I spent most of that time either missing the ball completely or hitting it in the wrong direction.

But nobody cared or made me feel bad about it. They just laughed and encouraged me to keep trying.

By the end of the practice, I was sweating and tired and my arms hurt. But I also felt good in a way I hadn’t felt in months.

For two hours I’d just been a person playing a game, not someone processing a canceled wedding or dealing with family drama. It was exactly what I needed.

I kept going to volleyball practice every week and by the third session I was starting to get the hang of serving without hitting the ball into the net. The team welcomed me like I’d been there forever and nobody asked about my personal life or why I suddenly had so much free time on Wednesday nights.

One of the guys on the team invited everyone out for drinks after practice and I went along feeling like maybe I could be a normal person doing normal things again. We sat at a bar talking about nothing important and I realized I was laughing at jokes and not thinking about Alex or the wedding for whole stretches of time.

It felt like progress even though I knew I still had a long way to go before I’d really moved on from everything that happened.

Legal Escalation

Ten weeks after the canceled wedding a thick envelope arrived at my apartment with a law firm’s return address I didn’t recognize. I opened it standing in my kitchen and found a formal letter on expensive letterhead demanding that I return various gifts the Redmond family had given me during my relationship with Alex.

The letter included an itemized list that made my blood pressure spike as I read through it. They wanted back the diamond earrings Judith gave me for my birthday, a pearl necklace from Christmas 2 years ago, the laptop Enrique gave me when mine died last year, a designer handbag Alex bought me for our anniversary, and several other items totaling about $15,000 according to their calculations.

The letter threatened legal action if I didn’t comply within 30 days and was signed by some lawyer whose name I didn’t recognize. I read it three times trying to figure out if this was actually happening, if Judith was really so bitter about me walking away that she was now trying to take back gifts from years ago.

The letter made it clear this was her new strategy for punishing me since she couldn’t control Alex anymore or force me to sign her terrible prenup. I put the letter down on my counter and just stood there feeling a mix of rage and disbelief that she was still coming after me months after I’d already walked away from her son and her family.

I called my lawyer the next morning and read her the entire letter over the phone. She asked me to scan it and send it to her office so she could review the specific language and the list of items they were demanding back.

I spent my lunch break at work dealing with this instead of actually eating, scanning documents at the office printer while trying not to let my co-workers see how stressed I was. My lawyer called me back that afternoon and explained that legally gifts given during a relationship generally don’t have to be returned unless they were explicitly conditional on marriage.

She said the engagement ring would normally be returned since it’s a conditional gift, but I’d already given that back at the rehearsal dinner in front of 50 witnesses. The other items on Judith’s list were birthday gifts, Christmas presents, and things given during the normal course of our relationship without any stated expectation that they’d be returned if we broke up.

My lawyer said Judith’s lawyer was probably just trying to intimidate me or hoping I’d give in to avoid the hassle of fighting back. She advised me to let her respond through her office declining to return the items and explaining the legal basis for keeping them.

The whole thing would cost me another few hundred in legal fees but my lawyer said it was worth it to establish that I wasn’t going to roll over every time Judith decided to harass me.

The legal threat from Judith made me angry in a way that actually clarified my thinking about Alex’s request to try again. I’d been on the fence about whether to give him another chance if he really was working on boundaries with his mother, letting myself hope that maybe we could find a way back to each other.

But this letter proved that even if Alex was making progress, his mother was escalating her attacks on me and showing no signs of backing off. Getting back together with him would mean signing up for years more of this kind of harassment, legal threats, and attempts to make my life miserable.

I couldn’t do that to myself no matter how much I still had feelings for Alex. I sat in my apartment that evening staring at my phone and finally texted him a message I’d been avoiding sending.

I told him I appreciated his efforts to work on boundaries and I could see he was trying, but I couldn’t be in a relationship where his mother was actively trying to hurt me. I said unless he was willing to go completely no contact with Judith we didn’t have a future together because I couldn’t spend my life defending myself from her attacks.

I hit send before I could change my mind and then put my phone down and waited for his response. Alex’s reply came through about an hour later and it was a long message that basically confirmed everything I already knew.

He said he couldn’t cut his mother out completely because she was still his mother and family was important to him. He wrote several paragraphs about how he understood why I was upset but I was being unreasonable to demand he choose between us.

He said he was hurt that I wouldn’t acknowledge the progress he’d made in therapy and setting boundaries. He reminded me that he’d stood up to her multiple times since the rehearsal dinner and was working really hard to change their relationship.

His message made it clear that he wanted me to accept a version of him that included his mother’s presence in our lives, just with better boundaries than before. He thought that should be enough and couldn’t understand why I needed him to go completely no contact.

Reading his response made me sad but also relieved because it proved I was making the right choice. He was never going to be able to give me what I needed which was a partner who would protect our relationship from his mother’s interference without me having to constantly ask for it.

I wrote back a short message saying I understood his position but it wasn’t compatible with what I needed and I wished him well. Then I did something I should have done weeks ago—I blocked Alex’s number after that exchange because I needed to stop having the same conversation over and over.

Every time we talked he tried to convince me that his incremental progress should be enough and I tried to explain why it wasn’t and we just went in circles without getting anywhere. Blocking him felt harsh but also necessary for my own mental health and ability to move forward.

I called Talia right after I did it and told her what happened with the gift demand letter and my final conversation with Alex. She said she was proud of me for choosing myself over a relationship that would have made me miserable and she insisted on taking me out for a nice dinner that weekend to celebrate.

We went to this Italian place we both loved and she ordered a bottle of wine even though it was expensive. We toasted to dodging bullets and she made me laugh with increasingly ridiculous descriptions of what my life would have been like as Judith’s daughter-in-law.

She painted a picture of me having to get Judith’s approval for every life decision, attending mandatory weekly dinners where Judith criticized everything I did, and eventually having kids that Judith would try to turn against me. By the end of her comedy routine, I was laughing so hard I was crying and I felt lighter than I had in weeks.