I feel like a total jerk.

Hi, brides-to-be! I am so thankful to have a place to post to just vent. From what I have observed on this forum as of thus far, you are some very wise people! I really appreciate you looking at my post and helping me to sort out my feelings. I’ve never really been a “me” focused person, and so the feelings that I have had over the past 5 days are ones that I don’t really know how to deal with. Let me explain. My younger sister (5 years younger) got engaged on Sunday! Normally, I would be over the moon happy for her, but I’m really having a hard time mustering up my inner “YAY!”. I’m trying so hard to have my face say “YAY!” and my words say “Oh Boy!”, but inside, my feelings are confused. My FI and I got engaged about 9 months ago. We are planning our wedding for the Fall of 2015. Now, I don’t feel that I am upset about my sister “stealing my thunder”, because we have had plenty of time to celebrate being engaged and I am the type of person who loves to see other people happy. The hard thing for me is that the timing of my sister’s engagement seems bittersweet. I know that I am going to sound like I am on a high-horse here, but she is so young. I just keep thinking about how she is still such a baby (in an affectionate way)- I know that I grew so much from the time that I was her age to the age where I am now. That in and of itself is making things difficult for me. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with being young and in love or being young and engaged, or even being young and married. It is just that we are SO different in this regard. My FI and I said we wanted to wait to get engaged until I graduate from my doctoral program. My FI is established- he has a house, a career, savings for us to live off of, etc. I’ve always been a “get my ducks in a row” kind of person and we have been a “plan for the future” type of couple regarding our marriage. I graduated with my doctorate recently, which was hard on my sister. She expressed a few times that she was sad that I was graduating and getting married while she is 'just doing the same old thing.' My sister has encountered some academic obstacles that have put her really behind in school. Also, she is a lot more carefree than me and has had a lot of fun while going through school, which is awesome, but has also delayed her progress academically. My sister and her now FI won’t graduate for another 2 to 3 years. Now, she says she doesn’t want to get married until after they graduate and get established in careers (although neither one of them knew, as of last week, what they wanted to do with their degrees). I guess that part of me just doesn’t understand- if you don’t intend on getting married for years to come, why choose NOW to get engaged? I know its not my business, but it gets me concerned and has left me scratching my head.

Not only that, but both of them are completely financially dependent on my parents. 100%. My parents pay cell phone bills, put gas in their cars, pay for car insurance, tuition, book money, etc. Heck. My parents helped pay for her ring. My sister’s FI’s parents really don’t help him out at all, which is sad, but that leaves him to really expect my parents to take care of him, as they have done since he was in high school. Also, they both announced the day that they got engaged that they plan to quit their part-time jobs. My brain is boggled. They have nothing in savings, they have no idea what kind of work they want to pursue, they go out and spend the money my mom gives them like its water… and yet, they have made the decision to get married?! The way that I view a proposal for marriage is that two people are promising to care for each other- and I know that there are different kinds of caring (emotional care, etc), but it just seems like they can’t even take care of themselves right now and have no place to promise to care for each other. Ultimately, my parents have been caring for both of them until now, and it looks like they are depending on them to take care of them from now on. On the day that my sister got engaged, she told me that it is a good thing that my FI and I are paying for our own wedding, because hers will be expensive enough for the both of us for our parents to have to pay for. (That in addition to some off-hand comment she made about how it “sucks that [she] is stealing all of [my] engagement sparkle.” Again, I think my engagement sparkle wore off after, like, a month of being engaged and so that is not what is hurtful to me, it was hurtful that the tone in which she made the comment sounded like she wanted it to be hurtful to me).

And I guess this is what just makes me a little more mad. My parents are very “old-school” and conservative. They have been totally against me even staying the night at my FI’s house because we are not married. I am doing a mandatory fellowship for licensure which is not paid, and so I live at home with my parents (and sisters) now. It really sucks not staying over with my FI, but because my parents are good enough to let me live with them, I figured that I should respect their wishes and live by their rules. I was told this morning that my sister’s new FI is no longer going to live with his father and is moving into my house, so I need to be moved out of my house and into my FI’s house by the end of the weekend. The fact that he might move in has been discussed at my house a few times in the past month or so, but I am feeling really hurt and disappointed that this is all happening now. It is like being hit with a ton of bricks multiple times- first, my sister getting engaged to a guy who she has no intention of marrying for several years, and now I have to move out, ASAP, so that my parents can take care of him. When I openly discussed my feelings of hurt, my sister told me that I was selfish because her “poor FI” has nowhere to go and nobody to take care of him, and that I was a b**** for not feeling sorry for him. Apparently he is going to stay in her room, so I need to move out just so that he can use my room as storage for all of his things. I know that I am probably sounding self-pitying and self-righteous here, and I apologize for that, but I feel that this is the only place that I can express my genuine emotions. I’m just hurt. I guess I saw my final 9 months at home as being an opportunity for me to just be close to my family and finish out enjoying life like I’ve always known it before I am someone’s wife and things change. It isn’t that I don’t feel sorry that he doesn’t have a place to go, but I am feeling really rejected.

Since I got engaged, my sister (who I made my maid-of-honor because, well, she is my sister) has been really passive aggressive toward me. She strung me along for a long time saying she would be upset if I didn’t bring her to important bridal appointments, then she would back out the day before and throw a fit about how I am disrespectful of her time (and so I would cancel the appointments altogether). She made comments about how it is “pathetic” that “of all people” I was the first of my sisters to get engaged. She would often get angry when she would interact with me (and I was feeling happy) because she said that I was “rubbing it in [her] face that just graduated with a doctorate and got engaged and [she] is the going nowhere.” I tried to reassure her that this couldn’t be further from the truth (and, frankly, I was just happy because I found a strawberry popsicle in the back of the freezer, and its my favorite flavor), and that it takes everyone different lengths of time to find what they want to do in life, and that this was OK. I even tried to tell her that I was envious of her because she took the time to really decide what she wanted to study in school, unlike me who picked a major while I was still in high school and got stuck with it without really exploring my passions. All of these seemed to fall on deaf ears and she has pretty much actively avoided me, so I try not to bring up wedding stuff. Then, when I was discussing wedding stuff with my other sister when she was out seeing a movie with her friend, she got really mad and threw a fit that she is a maid of honor, too, and should not be excluded from conversations. In our last interaction, I told her that I had scheduled my final dress shopping appointment (the one in which I planned to decide on a dress) and that, per her requested date, I had made appointments and couldn’t wait to show her my final 3 choices. Because she was vacillating so much between being mad that I wasn’t including her in wedding appointments and being mad that I was asking her to go, I decided to try to show her my gratitude and buy her love a little (which, I know, is a stupid thing to do). I went out and bought her some “thank you gifts”, including a Tiffany’s necklace that I know that she has had her eye on for years. I was so excited to give it to her! Then she sent me a text message saying that I “must be really stupid” to not realize that she has no time for me and that I should have been smart enough to ask someone else to be in my bridal party, because she doesn’t have time for any of my ****. I was super hurt and really thankful that Tiffany’s has a good return policy. Then, on the day that I had scheduled to travel out of town to buy my dress (because I wanted my grandma to approve of it first), she insisted that she and her now FI go with me, and that’s when they got engaged. I was shocked and tried to act really happy, but frankly, I was feeling a little bit numb. I had no idea that any of this was coming.

The other thing that just kind of gets to me is that we have always been really close to our family, and it is always a bummer that we live so far away from everyone else. She got engaged in the same city where everyone lives, and we were staying at my grandmother’s house. The next morning I asked her if she was planning on telling the rest of our family about her engagement, thinking that she would be really excited to. She said that she would rather that my grandmother, my mom or myself “spread the good news” because she felt like it is “too awkward” to talk about. At that point I thought that maybe she was feeling ambivalent and started wondering if this was something that her now FI just threw at her without her really knowing, but apparently, they had it planned this way and she went with him to look for rings and told him when she wanted the proposal to be. It was really an awkward place for me to be sharing her “good news” with the family, though, because I think that everyone else was just as surprised as I was. After a delightful 10 hour car ride home, though, she made sure that the first thing that she did was to drive to each of her friend’s houses to tell them all in person. It just seemed so unlike her (and a little immature, in my opinion) to be rushing to find a “special way” to tell her friends about the engagement, while not caring how and if the rest of our family found out, especially since we are really close to our family. I don’t know. I know that everyone values things differently, and just because something is important to me doesn’t mean that it is wrong that it is not important to her, it just feels like the sister that I thought that I knew would have been so excited to tell our family. To me, it just felt a little bit like this was more of a “status symbol” move than a genuine “we are ready, right now, to commit our lives to one another” decision.

I guess that is pretty much it. I know that I am sounding like an absolute jerk. I do not in anyway expect that other people’s lives will go on hold just because I am getting married. I know that my values don’t have to be my sister’s values and that the right thing to do is to be happy for her. I promise I am trying to do all of those things. There is a part of me, though, that feels sad for her. There are definite questions in my mind about why this is all happening now. I think that my sister feels like her life is stagnant- while her same-age cousins and friends are graduating and starting their careers, she is still in school. While I am in the process of getting married and starting my life with someone, she and her FI are living with my parents. I do not in anyway think that I am better than her (although I can see how it might sound this way), I just think that if her engagement is merely her way of feeling unstuck, then it is for the wrong reasons and this isn’t the right time for her. I know that I can’t tell other people’s hearts or know what is and is not the right time for anyone else, but I’m feeling quite melancholy over this whole ordeal. I need to get my butt in gear and start figuring out how to be happy for her, I know, but I feel like writing this all out and getting it out there is the only way for me to process it. Thank you for hearing me out. I know that I sound like a jerk (and I feel like a jerk), but I appreciate your advice and support. Am I just being selfish about all of this? How would you feel in this situation?