The Divorce Diaries: ‘My Mother-in-law From Hell. Why Another Person’s Wedding Was the Final Straw for Our Marriage’

“Hmm… my husband’s family don’t like me’, was one of Caitlin’s first thoughts when she met the family of Asher, her now-husband. Although, back then, they had only just started dating, but Caitlin knew it was going to be impossible to win them over, particularly Asher’s mother. Devastatingly, it would one day bring about the end of her marriage…

Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments over the last year we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances! and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.

If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.

Caitlin met her husband Asher in the early days of Tinder.

“It was back when people were embarrassed to say that’s how they met,” she says.

That’s likely why Asher told his parents that they met ‘through mutual friends’ at first, and why his mother looked quite flustered when she learned the truth.

“Asher’s brother accidentally said something about it and she was definitely not impressed,” she says.

Caitlin was far from surprised by the response though – she’d felt from the very start of their relationship that his mother did not approve of her.

“Asher comes from a farming family,” she says. “The expectation was, particularly with him being the eldest boy, that he’d take it over one day. He went to uni and studied accounting and then went to London for his OE, working for a big firm. I think they assumed he’d still come back to the farm, but, he came back to Auckland and moved in with me.”

Caitlin says she felt Asher’s mother, Kim, was hostile towards her from the start. She says Kim obviously believed that Asher did want to take over the farm, but it was Caitlin who was stopping it from happening.

“If Asher wanted to move back to the farm, honestly, I would have given it a go,” says Caitlin. “It’s not my dream, but I knew when we got married that it may be something he wanted to do one day – or something he might even feel he had to do – in which case, I was going to support him and do it. But, Asher didn’t want to do it. He always talked about it being the last thing he ever wanted to do. I told him I’d 100% support him if he ever changed his mind, I never said anything negative about it. But Kim thought it was me telling him I’d never do it.”

It became the norm for Caitlin to get the cold shoulder from Kim – she was used to her looking sour whenever she was around, or then switching it up to being over-the-top nice to the partner of Asher’s younger brother, who was showing an interest in taking over the farm one day.

“Whenever the two of us were around, she’d make a real scene about being so nice to her and laughing, and just, ugh, this whole performance,” she says.

Caitlin tried to ignore it, but it did upset her. She didn’t want her mother-in-law to dislike her. She talked to Asher on a number of occasions about it, but he shrugged it off.

“He said all that mattered was that he loved me,” she says.

Over the years, things got more difficult. Caitlin and Asher bought a house in Auckland – Kim’s tears were not happy ones – and then started trying for a baby. They were devastated when their much longed for pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

“Kim’s reaction was ‘some things weren’t meant to be’,” Caitlin says. “She was so cruel at the saddest time of my life.”

Caitlin found herself getting more frustrated with Asher. Kim’s behaviour was veering from rude, to completely cruel. But Asher still just told her to ignore it.

“We were having heaps of arguments about it,” she says. “He just couldn’t seem to see how it was affecting me.”

Then, came the death knell for their relationship.

Asher’s sister, Margot, had got engaged to her boyfriend and had started planning the wedding. One day, she went to the letterbox and saw a fancy envelope – it was addressed just to Asher. But Caitlin opened it anyway, assuming that it was for the wedding.

Sure enough it was, but it was an invite only to Asher.

“Part of me assumed that this was an invite for me too and was just a bit of a mistake, but most of me knew that I was deliberately not invited,” she says.

She called Asher and told him and he said it was clearly just a mistake and he’d ask his sister. But, he had an awkward conversation with her where she said that she’d spoken to Kim and they’d agreed that it might bring too much drama and ill-feeling to the wedding to have Caitlin there, so the invite was just for Asher.

“I was beyond angry and beyond hurt,” says Caitlin. “I had only ever done my best to be kind to his family – especially his sister. I’m the one who would get them birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day presents, I put up with so much but was always nice and this is how they repaid me.”

Caitlin says she asked her husband what he was going to do – was he still going to go to the wedding, even though she wasn’t invited?

“He said he couldn’t miss his sister’s wedding,” she says. “I was so angry. Where was his loyalty to me?”

For months they argued about it, and Asher even relayed some of these messages to his sister – that Caitlin didn’t want him to go if she wasn’t invited.

“Obviously, this is exactly what they wanted to her – or what Kim wanted to hear,” she says. “Because she used that as proof that I was making a scene, making it awkward and dramatic already. And obviously, that I told Asher what to do and what not to do – I was telling him not to go to his sister’s wedding, like I had told him he couldn’t take over the family farm. It was so hurtful and so insane.”

So, on the eve of Asher flying to the wedding, she told him that she loved him very much, but she couldn’t do this, like this anymore. He had to stand up for his wife. Going to this wedding meant he was okay with this behaviour, and okay to leave his wife at home, upset.

“I hated doing it, but I gave him the ultimatum,” she says. “If he went to the wedding without me, our marriage was over.”

Caitlin was heartbroken when he still got on the plane.

“I think he thought I wasn’t fully serious,” she says. “But, I couldn’t see a way to move forward after that.”

So, Caitlin moved into her parent’s home while Asher was away for the wedding over the weekend.

In the months after, they had a few goes at trying to make it work – they went to therapy together, but ultimately, Caitlin says there was too much hurt to fix things.

“I don’t think he ever quite took what happened with the wedding seriously,” she says, “He would just say that I asked something of him that was impossible. He needed to have a spine though and tell his mother and sister that this was an unacceptable way to behave. He needed to make it crystal clear that his decision to not take over the farm was his decision and his decision alone – that I was actually supportive of the idea of him taking it over.”

Caitlin says it’s been a hideous few years trying to get over it, but she’s recently started dating someone new and is hopeful about the future.

“I met his mum a month after we started dating and she couldn’t be nicer,” she says. “Who knows what the future will hold, but hopefully I might still get the chance to be a wife again, and maybe a mum.”

*names have been changed