'My fiancé is considering breaking up with me if I won't give up my chickens. AITA?' UPDATED

"My fiancé is considering breaking off our engagement, AITAH here?"

I (28F) and my fiancé (29M) have been engaged for three months and dating for two and a half years. Everything was going great and we were very happy, but recently we started having some issues.

We are not having a wedding ceremony, mainly because we want to start having children soon and don't want to spend that kind of money (both of our families live abroad so it would be very expensive to fly everyone out) and reserve it for our down payment on our house. We decided to buy a house together and after that get legally married and start our family once we get settled. This is where the issues came.

I come from a family of farmers (the fruits and vegetables kind not the animal type) from both sides of my family but my parents are not farmers. My dream has always been to have a farm, for personal use, not as a job but my fiancee doesn't want that and i accepted that.

However, one thing that is non-negotiable for me are my chickens. I have 10 chickens and he knows that, so when house hunting i was looking for a house with a decent backyard to be able to raise them freely as they do in the house im renting for now.

He started getting distant and avoiding me after i told him i planned to bring my chickens to our new house but i didnt put two and two together until l asked him a week later. After a week of being avoided I decided to go to his house to talk things out this past Saturday.

I asked him what was wrong with him he said that he thought i would get rid of my chickens before moving together and that's why he was putting up with it, but that he didn't want chickens in our house and that it was making him reconsider our relationship, because, his words, “he didn’t want someone who came with package” and then asked me to get rid of my chicken.

This made me extremely angry and I admit that I lost it, I started hysterically crying and told him that my chicken were more important to me than our relationship (not true at all, I said this without thinking in a state of panic) so if he was not willing accept that my chicken are coming with me then we were done.

I got in my car and went home, where I spent the whole day crying. He tried calling me, and I did not pick up because I didn’t want to say more things i didn’t mean, which I told him in a message.

On Sunday I was feeling better and decided to call him and we agreed to meet for coffee that same afternoon to talk about it. I started by apologising about what I told him, and I told him it was not how I felt at all, to which he told me that he knew I didn’t mean it and that he didn’t hold it against me.

I decided to be honest with him and told him about the farm thing, how it was my life dream and that it affected me not being able to have this when we could well afford it (we are both engineers and have decent salaries) and he wouldn’t need to do anything on it.

I was honest about how I was not aware of the impact this had had on me until he asked me to get rid of my chickens (which, as weird as it may sound, I love like my own children), ultimately asking me to get rid of the last piece of my childhood dream, and how that just set me off.

He said I was being selfish and that he needed some time to think because he was not sure if this is how he wanted his life to be from now on, which I accepted (though, being honest, I don’t understand) I talked to my best friend about this and she told me to just give up the farm thing, insinuating I was in the wrong, but, I assume, not wanting to directly tell me.

Me and my fiancee have not talked after that, and I’m giving him the space to think about our situation. Am I really in the wrong here? I genuinely do not understand why this is such a big deal and I feel like he really must not love me as much as I thought he did if he doesn’t want my dreams to come true and it’s eating me alive. Any advice is appreciated, but please don’t be too harsh.

What do you think? AITA? This is what commenters had to say:

Electronic_Charge_96 said:

You will be the @$$hole if you marry him. You are NOT COMPATIBLE. Do not proceed

theFCCgavemeHPV said:

Your friend is wrong and your fiancé is wrong. Why would he want to marry someone he was hoping would be completely different after the wedding? That’s stupid. You’re supposed to marry someone you actually like as they are when you propose to them.

Marriage should not change a person completely and no one should expect someone to change because of marriage. It’s way easier to find someone who is how you want them to be already. What a moron, honestly. Ugh. I’m seeing red for you!

Do NOT give up your dream for a stupid man who doesn’t accept you as you are. I would be livid if my husband had said some BS like that to me before we got married. He would get his stupid ring and his stupid life back because what the actual F.

Y’all are just not compatible. That’s ok. Be glad you figured it out now before you got legally and financially tangled with him and a house you hate. Before you gave up your chickens just to find out you’re miserable. You will find someone who wants to support and share your dream with you. And if not, go get that farm on your own baby!

Fwiw I think your chickens are way more important than this crappy relationship too. Please don’t take him back. Your happiness is important and if chickens and farmland are required for that, don’t budge. There’s no dick worth giving up your dreams for. And boy is he a dick.

Candid_Deer_8521 said:

Nta. Him not wanting a package deal is bs. Everything that matters in your life is part of that package. From in-laws to hopes and dreams, from jobs to personage opinions. He takes all of you, even the flaws of he gets none of you.

Ohmaggies said:

You aren’t an @$$hole but you don’t sound very compatible if you giving up the farm and having backyard chickens is too much for him. Your friend is an asshole for sure. Why should you have to give up all your dreams for no compromise?

A week later, she shared this update:

Hello, i wanted to give an update to my post since a lot has happened in a week and honestly i need to get it off my chest. I also wanted to thank everyone for giving their thoughts on the situation and take the time to respond.

Now onto the update. I guess this does not come as a surprise to anyone, me included, but we broke up. There is A LOT more to the story than what i knew and honestly im still trying to process everything that has happened.

After almost a week of no contact, he called me on Friday and told me he wanted to talk to me as soon as possible so i told him to wait for me in my house and i would go there once i was done with work. I got home at 9pm and i found him drunk on my couch crying while hugging his dog, why was his dog in my house?

I had no clue either. By the time i got home, he was way too drunk to have a conversation with me so i put him to sleep and decided we would talk the next day. I woke up first so i started cleaning the kitchen (which he made a mess trying to find any alcohol) but at some point he came in, looked at me straight in the eyes and told me “i’m moving to New York, we are over,” before even saying good morning.

After that he tried to leave but i grabbed him and asked him to explain himself. We talked, and he finally explained himself. He told me how before everything happened, he thought about living in a farm and how the more he thought about it the more he liked it, and that he was thinking about suggesting it to me again (after he said that there was no way he could live that way and to just forget about it).

After that he told me everything that has been happening recently. Apparently, a day before he started ignoring me, his boss told him that there was a vacancy on a role he could take in the main office in New York (he was working on a branch in our city) and he asked for a day to think about it, but he really wanted to take it.

He talked to his mom about it, and she told him that it was good and that we both could move to New York together and start there as a new family.

After that, he decided to call MY best friend (idk why) and she told him that I would never approve of moving to New York and he shouldn’t even suggest it because i would get mad, that he should either move alone or reject the job, but not tell me (this makes me sound horrible, but i swear i can in fact communicate, i do not know why she says that).

After that he called his mom AGAIN and told her that he was moving to New York alone and breaking off our engagement, and his mom told him that it was a horrible idea and that he should just reject the offer because he was getting old and needed to start a family soon.

Mind you this man is pushing 30 and still doing everything his mom tells him, so of course he decided to do just that. The next day he rejected the offer, and that’s when he started ignoring me.

During the week he was ignoring me, he thought about everything and decided that the best idea was to make me sacrifice things too, until he didn’t feel bad about rejecting the job offer anymore (miserable but together basically? lmfao), so everything started with asking me to get rid of the chickens.

He called me selfish because he gave up a lot for me but i wasn’t willing to give up my pets for him (mind u i did not know he had rejected the job offer), and he asked for time to think about our engagement because he didn’t feel better about anything after telling me to give up something.

And he had to think about how far he should go to feel better about rejecting the job offer, or if he would feel better at all after i gave up almost everything for him(the audacity of this man LMFAO). So basically, the chickens were never an issue he was just trying to make me feel miserable because he was.

On Friday he came to the conclusion that he did not hold enough power over me to make me give up everything for him (finally) so he decided to just move to New York alone and break up with me.

He contacted his boss to ask if the job offer was still valid, but after two weeks, it obviously wasn’t, but there was a lower position available (worse than his current job) and since he had already made up his mind he just took it.

That’s when he called me and told me he needed to talk to me ASAP. He went home, picked up his dog (too big to bring to an apartment, so he’s just “getting rid of it” by giving it to me, said by him) and came to my house to drink everything i had in my home.

After telling me all of this he decided it was an amazing idea to ask for the ring back but after everything he said there’s no way i was not selling it and taking the money. That’s the situation we are in now, he left after that and, obviously left the dog in my house.

This weekend was hard It’s weird to go from engaged to single but it’s better to break it off now than when i’ve given up everything for him and we have children stuck in the middle of everything. I’m also trying to figure out whether my best friend is really my best friend or not (i did not go into detail but she dragged me through the mud to my ex) but that’s another story.

I also contacted my boss today and asked if there was any possibility of working from home full time ( i currently wfh four days a week and go to the office on Friday) and it might be possible in a few months so im very excited to move further away from the city and getting my dream farm.

Hopefully i find a farm man to build my dream farm and a big family with hahaha, but for now im focusing on myself and my chickens, and im going to buy a coop like those in movies with seats for each one of them that look like a little house because after all this i feel like i deserve it.

Anyways Im doing better than i expected and im loving having his St bernard in my house, it makes it feel a lot fuller and i love it. I don’t know if anyone wanted an update but thats it, hope you enjoy. If anyone has any tips on how to get over all of this let me know hahaha.