Us: 'We're Getting Married!' Them: 'How Can You Be So Selfish?!'

His family is Orthodox Jewish. We're not. When they objected to our union my fiance and I began planning a wedding anyway — and that's when we learned we weren't alone.

Illustrations by Eron Hare

I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that my fiancé’s father had announced he would “wear black to mourn our wedding day.”

I’ve never met the guy, but I knew enough about him to not expect anything different. We had hoped to have the support of my fiancé’s mother, who, just weeks before, had come into our home, embraced me, and said, “We’re family now. You have us.” She’d even sounded excited when we called to tell her how the proposal went down on the phone. But not 24 hours after our little engagement banner flickered across Facebook, the celebratory comments were edged out by a hysterical phone call.

“How could you do this to me? To the family?” his mother cried. “Why did you have to announce it publicly? You’re so selfish!”

She had, apparently, already been flooded with calls herself – even accosted at the grocery store – in their modern Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey.

“What a shame,” people said to Lee’s mother when they heard of our engagement. “Thi…