DEAR JANE: My vegan husband is refusing to allow MEAT at our wedding

• In her latest agony aunt column, best-selling author Jane Green gives advice to a bride who has seen a new side to her fiancé and now has cold feet 
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Dear Jane,

My wedding is coming up in a few months… but during the planning, my fiancé and I have become involved in such furious arguments, over the food of all things, that I’m not sure I actually want to go through with it.

My fiancé is vegan and has been since we met, which actually put me off him when we first matched on Hinge because I’m a gal with a big appetite for burgers and steak. But luckily it never got between us – even when we started cooking together at home.

However, when he proposed and we started planning our wedding, he told me that he wouldn’t feel comfortable serving any meat at the reception. A lot of his family is vegan and he said that they’d be offended to even be around meat. 

It’s been a bone of contention for months now – to the point where we’ve actually gotten into screaming matches in front of the caterer because he was mad that I’d even requested to sample a meat dish.

He allows meat in our home so it makes no sense to me that he would want to ban it from our wedding. 

I know my friends and family are going to be miserable at the idea of attending a vegan dinner – but when I raised that, he made it seem like his family is the only one that matters. 

The stubborn way that he’s dealt with this whole thing is giving me really cold feet – I’ve seen another side to him during this whole process that I didn’t realize existed before, and I’m terrified that I’ve made a huge mistake and agreed to marry the wrong guy. 

But is it stupid to call off my wedding over a steak!?

Help me please.

From,

Confused Carnivore

Dear Confused Carnivore,

It would be short-sighted to call off your wedding over a steak, but the steak in question is actually a signifier of bigger issues, which you are starting to see.

Marriage is nothing if not compromise. Two people come together, each with their own beliefs, their own way of doing things, and no matter how justified each one is that theirs is the right way, the way forward to peace and happiness is to find the middle ground – the way that either works for both, or slightly doesn’t work for either.

It’s not that your fiancé is vegan that is the problem, but that he is not willing to consider a compromise for your wedding where presumably half the guests will be carnivores. 

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This is surprising given that he already allows meat in your house, and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind his intransigence. 

You say a lot of his family are vegan, which means not all his family are vegan. I’m sure they are adult enough to deal with people eating meat around them.

You need to get to the bottom of this with your husband, why he is so insistent, and then you need to reach a compromise that accommodates both of your families. 

This wedding is about both of you, and both of you have equal needs. Should he not have any willingness to compromise, I would suggest that you may have discovered his fatal flaw. 

Be very grateful to have discovered it before you got married rather than after.