'AITA for asking my husband to prioritize our family tradition over his new friendship?' UPDATED 3X

"AITA for asking my husband to prioritize our family tradition over his new friendship?"

My husband (35M) and I (32F) have a very small but meaningful tradition we started the first year we got married. It’s nothing major, but it’s important to me. Every November, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, we take a day trip to this lakeside town about an hour away.

We spend the day walking, talking, and picking out a new ornament for our Christmas tree, something that’s meaningful to our year. It’s just one day, but it’s one of those things that makes the holiday season special for us.

My husband recently became great friends with a guy from his gym. They hit it off quickly, and I think it’s great because my husband doesn’t make new friends easily. He seems like a genuinely nice person and shares a lot of his interests, like hiking and gaming, and I know it’s refreshing for my husband to have someone he clicks with so well.

Here’s the issue: My husband's friend invited him to go on a weekend trip for the exact same weekend as our tradition. My husband seemed hesitant to bring it up at first, but eventually, he asked if I’d be okay with us rescheduling our tradition to another weekend so he could go on this weekend with his friend.

I was caught off guard, and I told him that it kind of hurt my feelings that he’d even consider moving it. He told me it’s not a big deal for us to just go another weekend, and he’s right in the sense that it doesn’t really affect anything logistically.

But this trip has always felt like “our thing." It’s not that I don’t want him to have fun or make new friends, but I kind of feel like he’s minimizing something that’s special to us, or at least special to me. When I told him that, he looked surprised and then frustrated, saying I was overreacting.

He ended up agreeing to keep the weekend for our tradition, but I could tell he was disappointed, and I feel guilty for that. Part of me wonders if I’m being stubborn about a little ritual that maybe only I care about as much as I do. So, AITA for asking him to prioritize our tradition over his new friend?

UPDATES:

I saw some people asking how long we have been married. We’ve been married for six years, and we’ve been doing this tradition since our first year together, always on the same weekend.

A lot of people have asked why this specific weekend matters so much to me. I think it’s because we’ve kept this tradition on the same weekend for over six years, and to me, the timing feels like an integral part of the tradition itself. It’s become a marker for the start of the holiday season in my mind, and changing it feels like losing some of the meaning behind it.

AFTER A FEW HOURS: I want to thank everyone who shared their opinion. After reading the comments and giving myself some time to reflect, I decided to talk to my husband again. I told him I felt bad for how things went earlier and that I didn’t mean to make him feel like I'm keeping him on a leash.

I also explained why our little tradition feels so special to me and how I've always seen that weekend as "our" weekend. He admitted that he hadn’t realized how much it meant to me. He said he’d been excited about the trip with his friend because it was the first time in a long while that someone reached out to him like that, and that he didn't want to let that slip away.

We both agreed we could have handled the conversation better and that neither of us wanted the other to feel like their feelings didn’t matter. As said earlier, we’ve decided to stick to our tradition this year as planned, and my husband is going to plan a weekend trip with his friend in January, when the holidays are over.

Here's what top commenters had to say about this one:

Mortified-Pride said:

NTA, I get it, but from his reaction this is definitely more a 'you' thing than an 'our' thing. By all means, keep your tradition but make it a sometime-in-November thing. No need to be so rigid about it - then everyone's happy, right?

GalianoGirl said:

YTA. Your husband is more than willing to continue to activity, he is asking for flexibility in the date. Relationships are about give and take. Not I want what I want when I want it.

Return_of_the_HoWaT said:

YTA - This is an easy compromise. The date has no actual meaning to you, just the tradition. HE STILL WANTS TO GO WITH YOU. Just on a different day. Don’t die on this hill, it's kind of goofy.

similar_name4489 said:

NTA annual tradition with spouse > trip with new gym bro friend. It should not have even been a question. I would be pretty insulted if a brand new friendship derailed an annual tradition with my spouse; what is the foundation of our marriage sand? If you can set aside your spouse for a friend you barely know, that’s disquieting.

ImprovementFar5054 said:

YTA. Tradition is the illusion of permanence, and irrational. Yes, some people take great psychological comfort in the ritualism. It feels grounding. However, you only have the right to impose that on yourself.

When you attempt to force a ritual on someone else, then you become TA. People really fly off the handle if tradition is messed with in the same way OCD people fly off the handle if there is a flaw in a pattern.

A reason many families fight at christmas and other holidays is often because of tradition expectations. Where one party envisions the perfect ritual, and someone else doesn't know, care or envisions it differently. Then one person is accused of "ruining everything." Don't be that person who makes that accusation.

TimeRecognition7932 said:

YTA. You can go any weekend and it's only important to you. He just made a friend and you can't compromise for him.