Dear Prudence: My Boyfriend Wants His Ex to Come Live With Us.

[minoanmiss]

Can't move in. My boyfriend lost his job and has moved in with me, since I own my own home and rent prices have risen sky-high. We have been talking about marriage. He shares custody of his 5-year-old son with his ex. We have a room set up for him. The ex is pregnant and broke up with her boyfriend. Her landlord is not renewing the lease, and she can’t find another place in the city. Her parents live out of state. She wants to move into my house just until she gets “back on her feet.” I said hell no. I don’t have strong feelings about her, but a situation like that can only go south.

My boyfriend is upset with me for not even considering it. I told him I am happy if his son moves in with us full time but we need boundaries between our family and his ex’s. She and her new baby are not our problem, to put it bluntly. He said I am costing his son his mother. I told him it wasn’t fair and that he could always move to where the grandparents lived if he’s so concerned. He can’t put this all on me. All this has shaken me. I love this man and his son, but I am wondering about what happens if we break up? Should I do it now? Am I panicking over nothing? I only dated casually before this.

A: This certainly isn’t “nothing,” so you can let go of that fear at least. Obviously your boyfriend’s ex is in a difficult situation—you all are—but it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “I’m not comfortable with the idea of living with your ex,” especially when the proposed time frame is “until she gets ‘back on her feet,’ ” which is difficult to write into a lease and could take anywhere from a few months to a few years. The fact that neither your boyfriend nor his ex can afford rent in your city right now is terrible, but you’re not to blame for the housing market. Nor are you being unreasonably cruel by saying, “The three of us living and co-parenting two children with three different parents is not a sustainable solution.”

You’re right to be shaken by your boyfriend’s assertion that you are “costing his son his mother” because it’s totally inappropriate for your boyfriend to put you in that position of responsibility. I don’t think you have to dump him tomorrow, but you should certainly share your concerns with him, reiterate that you are not available to live together as a threesome, and encourage him to come up with alternatives for his co-parent and his child.

Comments

I am conflicted about this one

[minoanmiss]

1) depending on the relationships I wonder if a living situation could be explicitly negotiated....

2) I feel really bad for LW. Her boyfriend's statement "you're depriving my son of his mother" is really cruel, and I'm tempted to say DTMFA. What people say when they're angry is what they really think, and when people show us who they are we should believe them.

3) But there's her relationship with the kid, which is real. It's so hard in our society to talk about one's relationship with children one is not related to by blood or adoption (often even the latter) without sounding creepy. I think this is in part because of how much our society sexualizes any kind of interest in a non-family-member, even if one is trying to describe the process by which a child becomes one's family member. And yet I reread wht I wrote and I feel like I'm implying child abuse doesn't happen/isn't worth worrying about, which is not what I want to say AT ALL.

But I have been in more than one relationship where I also loved the kids as my friends, and that... complicated things.

Re: I am conflicted about this one

[lilysea]

A friend of mine had a surrogate-uncle type relationship with his platonic-flatmates kid, and was the in-case-of-emergencies contact if the mother was unavailable.

On more than one occasion he took a day off work to get the kid to the emergency department, with the mother on some occasions, without the mother on other occasions.

Adults can have appropriate care towards children who are not blood relatives.

Another friend of mine logged more hours providing childcare to her platonic-flatmate's youngest child than either the biological mother, or the biological mother's romantic partner, did. [There were a lot of children in the house, all the adults had full time jobs, and that's the way it worked out.]

Re: I am conflicted about this one

[rosefox]

What people say when they're angry is what they really think

Oh, I don't think that's necessarily true at all! Sometimes what people say when they're angry is something they're scared is true, or a way of deflecting blame because their anger is rooted in guilt... "You're depriving my son of his mother" sounds like that to me, an expression of the boyfriend's shame at not being able to provide for his son (or himself) and his fear of his ex moving away and taking his son with her. It's still absolutely cruel and uncalled-for, and he needs to find ways to talk about his feelings that don't harm anyone this way, but I wouldn't call it a direct expression of his deepest truest thoughts.

[cereta]

Wow, this is a tough one. There is no outcome here that isn't going to hurt someone, and if LW is a woman, she's almost certainly been conditioned to see it as her job to make sure that as few people get hurt, and as little hurt, as possible.

And it's easy to say in the abstract, "It is not your job to solve this situation." It isn't. But that doesn't change the reality that someone is going to get hurt.

This is especially true given the boyfriend's framing of this as her "costing his son his mother." That more than anything makes me worry that there is no good solution, here. If the LW draws the line she really needs to draw, even if he accepts it now, he's likely to (unfairly) resent her. The best advice I could give is, "Set your boundaries, but be prepared for the fallout."

[ioplokon]

I wonder if their shared custody situation is tied to remaining in Current_City? The "having to move out of state" thing adds a lot more stress on the whole child front. I think one thing LW's boyfriend can do is work with his ex on the custody issue so that she doesn't risk permanently losing it if she has to move in with her parents during covid.

Anyway idk, I would probably let her stay for a couple months unless I had specific concerns about her character/the breakup (like if they had like just broken up...), but I also literally have a standing agreement with one of my exes and her wife that if I got a job in Their_City, I could live with them until I found a local place so that's the kind of generosity I would hypothetically want to extend in the future.

[lemonsharks]

My first thought was, "I bet Boyfriend still wants to bang his ex (and may already be banging her)" with a side of "shore up your birth control immediately" and "absolutely under no circumstances allow his ex to move in."

(I have been hanging out, primarily, on /r/aita these days.)

[ashbet]

I have good relationships with all but one of my exes (and some of THEIR exes are close friends of mine), but it doesn’t sound like the LW is close with the ex, an indefinite “until she gets back on her feet” in a high-rent area during COVID might last a really long time... *and* living with a newborn not my own... yeesh, I wouldn’t do it.

(I co-parented my triad partners’ newborn, but that was a VERY different situation in which the three of us are a devoted team, I was the experienced parent in that particular situation, and this is a child whose life I have an ongoing, permanent, loving place in.)