Is It Okay To Ask For Wedding Money From Your Parents?

(Photo by me! Please give me attribution and link to CC if you reproduce it)

I've aroused a lot of anger and disdain for my entry on the wedding industrial complex; if I had to do it over again, I'd probably phrase it differently but my message would probably remain the same. But today I wanted to point you (my readers) to some more that's been written about the matter.

First of all, let me just say that advice columnist Cary Tennis is a genius. The way he plays with words is beyond compare; he makes reading advice columns a mental exercise, instead of a prurient one. If you ask me, he blows away "Dear Prudence" over at Slate.com.

Tennis recently wrote a column about wedding money that I thought was rather poignant (most of his columns are). In the column, a woman asks for advice on whether she should ask her mother for wedding money to use on a down payment for a house instead. His response, reads, in part:

Do ask your mother for help. Yes, ask her for money. But do not tread on her dreams. Think of it this way. Say she has some gold. She has made the gold into a statue. The statue gleams in the sun. One day she plans to give it to you. It represents her hopes and dreams for you. It represents her ideal. So say you come to her and you say, I'd like a chunk of that statue for a down payment on a house. I'm not really into the statue, per se, but I could use a chunk of it for my own purposes. Or say you're thinking you'd like to just melt down the whole statue, convert it to dollars and invest it.

Click here to read the whole thing.