In my last “Rejected Wedding Themes” post, I wrote about the hunting camouflage-themed wedding goodies that you can get through Oriental Trading Company, which the Future Missus vetoed. I vetoed today’s theme.
When Tucker Blandford (a name so appropriate that it’s downright Dickensian) got cold feet about his impending marriage to Alex Lancaster, he felt that his only option was to fake his own death.
The couple met in August 2012 while Alex, a British national, was studying in Connecticut. It was one of those whirlwind romances that seemed doomed to end when she was scheduled to return to the UK, which is likely what prompted Tucker to propose marriage before she left. The combination of some time apart, how quickly the relationship had escalated, and what was probably some feeling that he was throwing away his twenties as a single man (both Alex and Tucker are 23 now) must’ve scared him. While she was busy planning the wedding, he was busy coming up with a desperate, harebrained plan.
He placed a call to Alex, posing as his dad:
“I picked up my phone and there was a man saying he was Tucker’s dad. He told me Tucker had been deeply depressed and wanted to die, so had thrown himself in front of a car,” Lanchester, 23, told the Daily Mail. “The man explained that they had been trying to send Tucker off to a psychiatric unit for help. But it was too late. I couldn’t breathe. It was absolutely devastating.”
Tucker failed to account for the fact that Alex had bonded with his parents while they were together in the U.S.. He probably expected her to simply move on, forgetting that she might call them to commiserate and offer her condolences. She phoned his mother, and this happened:
“His parents didn’t even know we were getting married. They thought we had broken up when I left America,” she told the Daily Mirror. “Then it hit me, that voice on the other end of the phone had sounded eerily familiar. I realised it was Tucker pretending to be his dad. My whole world crumbled.”
“She said Tucker was absolutely fine –- but she also thought we’d split up. She knew nothing about the wedding.”
It also turned out that the wedding venue in Connecticut also didn’t know about the wedding, since he’d never reserved it.
Even the anchor on Tucker’s local news station seems unimpressed.
“I’m a terrible, awful person. I know I shouldn’t have told her I was dead, but I didn’t know what else to do,” Tucker said in a statement to the Daily Mail.
“Alex is an amazing girl but I got scared and wanted to get out of the relationship. It was moving extremely fast and with us being in different countries, it was really hard. At the time I just felt like I couldn’t tell the truth and thought if I could just postpone everything it would be better.”
The ironic thing was that the entire Atlantic Ocean was there to help make things easier for him. Although breaking up over the phone is bad and calling off an engagement is worse, it’s a realistic thing to do given the distance and expense involved, and far better than faking your own death because you don’t want to be the bad guy. And as Machiavellian as this sounds, it would’ve spared our coward from having to look her in the eyes and say “it’s over”.
Alex seems to be turning her lemon into lemonade; the Daily Mirror reports that she’s started a successful business making wedding favors. As for Tucker: he’ll be living with this one for some time, and it’s likely he’ll have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do to any woman he gets involved with.
