Kate Hackett
On one hand, you want your daughter to have the opportunity to receive an education and build a better future for herself. On the other hand, your husband strongly believes in the traditional values of your religion and culture, and is upset that your daughter has strayed from those values.
So what do you do?
Is there a chance those traditional values are just, bluntly, wrong?
u/husbandlie recently posted on Reddit’s AITA sub wondering if she was wrong “for misleading my husband for years to make him pay for our daughter’s education”. This is tricky because we bump into cultural differences, so let’s read her story.
OP and her husband have two kids, a son and a daughter. They saved for their son’s overseas education.
I (45F) have been married to my husband (56M) since I was 18. I have a son 27M and a daughter 22F.
We are not rich but decently well off. We always planned for our son to study abroad in a western country fo university since he was a child and this is expensive due to the high international tuition fees. This went as planned for my son.
Since OP gained access to the internet, she has educated herself and wants the same for her daughter. Better, she wants her daughter to go beyond her own high school level education.
However ever since I got a laptop and phone with Internet, I have used it to learn new things on my own from sources like MIT courseware and youtube and I really wanted my daughter to be an educated woman. I also stopped believing in my religion while my husband is devout. I pretend to be religious and follow our customs for the sake of the marriage. I only have high school level education.
OP convinced her husband that a good marriage prospect will want an educated woman.
The plan for my daughter was to find a boy from a nice family for her to marry, and not go to university or to go to a local one if she wanted to.
The bit of trickery worked: the husband agreed and the daughter attended a top university in a Western society.
I convinced my husband that these days boys from good families want an educated woman for status reasons even if she does not work and that if our daughter had a western degree she could marry into an elite family. It worked and he paid for her to attend a top university which she got into which is actually better than the one my son went to.
After graduating, the daughter also told her mom she’s moving away from this religion and wants a different life. A life Mom could not have. This daughter is staying in the West.
My daughter after leaving also confided to me that she does not believe our religion anymore and started living a different lifestyle, one I can never have. She recently graduated, got a work visa and stayed in the western country and has a good job there.
OP’s husband, however, is very angry and feels he was tricked.
My husband got really angry when he heard and is feeling really cheated and blames me as I pursuaded him to pay for her education and let her go. He even found a picture of her online of a university competition she did where she won a prize and posed for a picture without head covering.
OP is not sure she did the right thing.
I am feeling a little guilty since it is his money that let her go to university and now we may not get to see her again. AITA?
Sorry for any mistakes, my English is not the best.
What a horrible conundrum for any parent: to be caught between the social mores of a society and the prospect for development must be so hard.
Reddit was quick to chime in, saying, “NTA- there is nothing close to AH for any mother who wants their daughter to have a better life! Allowing her to make her own life choices is awesome! You knew she no longer followed or believed so why would forcing her into a marriage be anything good?”
