agonyaunt | (no subject)

DEAR ABBY: I am a 42-year-old divorced father of two. I have had a girlfriend, "Dawn," for about a year. She has met my kids, but she's still uncomfortable with the "situation." She has concerns about me having been married before, such as having experienced many of the firsts she has yet to enjoy.

Dawn doesn't like being in my house because I had it when I was married, and she says my kids remind her of my past. She says she doesn't want to share me with anyone, including them.

When we're alone, we are absolutely phenomenal as a couple. We love and care about each other deeply. This is causing a tremendous amount of stress on us, and neither of us knows how to handle it or what to do. Please help. -- TWO'S COMPANY IN ILLINOIS

DEAR TWO'S COMPANY: Forgive me for being blunt, but you need to break it off with this woman before you waste any more of her time or yours. You may be crazy about Dawn, but your first responsibility must be to your children, and she has made it clear how she feels about them.

You may be phenomenal as a couple, but there are more people involved than just the two of you. She needs to find someone who has no encumbrances, and you need to find a lady who has a greater capacity for love than Dawn appears to be capable of.

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I'm going to grump about the last line. Just because two people aren't compatible due to life situations doesn't mean either of them is incapable of love. And I just heart the implication that Dawn should sacrifice her own wants and needs because LOVE. *eyeroll*

The relationship is not going to work out. Neither person is under an obligation to force it to work. Move on and end of story.

I agree that Dawn should not sacrifice her wants and needs for love, but I don't think Abby implied that she should. Abby didn't say that the couple should stay together and Dawn should learn to fake liking the kids. She said the opposite: that they should split, and Dawn should find a less encumbered partner who can meet her wants and needs.

It's one thing to acknowledge that a relationship isn't going to work and move on. If Dawn had recognized the problem and ended the relationship, that would have been fine. It's a completely different thing to pressure a father to distance himself from him children. That's despicable, so I don't feel much sympathy for Dawn. I think Abby is absolutely correct that the LW needs a partner with a greater capacity for love: somebody who can love both him and his children. Maybe Abby could have phrased it without taking a jab at Dawn, but like I said, I can't feel much sympathy for Dawn.

Yeah, with you. If you can't stand kids, the loving thing would be to break up with a partner who had them. Dawn's lack of love isn't about being unable to handle the kids, it's being the kind of despicable person who tries to make a father choose her over his kids. That's bullshit and I'm cool with judging her over it.

If the LW were talking about, say, how Dawn's career ambitions means that she doesn't want to be a stay at home mom to his kids, I would totally agree with you. But I think that wanting a father to cut off contact with his children is a rather indefensible stance, above and beyond being merely neutrally incompatible.

Reading the other comments, I think I read less into the line "she doesn't want to share me with anyone" than everyone else did. Which is probably an indication that I got it wrong, and I'll accept that. But the way I saw it was less that Dawn is actively trying to break up the LW and his kids, since he doesn't really give any examples of stuff she did--rather, that she's expressed these feelings to him. I totally didn't come to the same conclusion that she has taken steps to try to cut them off from him (which would, yes, be despicable). And there is the possibility that if this has been going on for a while, LW was feeling pressure in that direction even if she didn't explicitly say more than that.

Anyhoo, it's purely a matter of interpretation of a poorly-described situation on the internet and I agree with the sentiments of everyone else if the facts are as they're saying they are, so I'll leave it at that and step out here.