agonyaunt | Dear Abby: Boyfriend's dad treats me terribly, and boyfriend won't address it

DEAR ABBY: I have been with my boyfriend, "Jake," for a year and a half. To put it mildly, his dad does not like me. He has never thought I was good enough for his son, and he doesn't like the fact that I have a daughter from an earlier relationship. He thinks I'm interested in Jake only for his money, even though I work a full-time job and Jake and I share everything equally, except my daughter's expenses. I pay for those myself.

When Jake and I attend family gatherings for holidays or birthdays, his dad refuses to say hello to me. He does, however, make derogatory or negative remarks about me to Jake. It's incredibly hurtful and demeaning.

I have tried bringing it up to Jake, and he agrees. But he will not address it with his dad because "Dad won't change." Can you help? -- DISLIKED IN MASSACHUSETTS

DEAR DISLIKED: I don't know how serious Jake is about you, but if he was in love with you and planned on marrying you, he would INSIST that, at the very least, his father treat you with respect. Dad won't change because his son isn't assertive enough to make plain that if he doesn't, he will be seeing less of the both of you. I can only hope that your child isn't on the receiving end of this kind of treatment, because if that's happening -- for both of your sakes -- I'm advising you to end the romance with Jake.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Even if the daughter isn't directly on the receiving end, she's seeing a *terrible* example of how a person, any person, deserves to be treated, much less in a relationship. Even if Jake isn't the one mistreating mom directly, the daughter is learning that it's okay for her mother to be mistreated. That's a very, very bad lesson for her to learn. LW, even if you won't put an end to this for your own sake (which you should), do so for your daughter's.

Yeeeeeah.

To me, I end up with a little ear-cock, a la a cat hearing something move, at "Dad won't change" - depending, that can mean anything from "I'm not assertive enough to make dad change" through to "hello this family is a neck-deep mire of emotional abuse and 'Jake' has in fact learned that trying to make dad change makes everything worse for everyone."

But either way, LW needs to draw the boundary of "I will not go to somewhere I am going to be demeaned and I sure as fuck am not bringing my daughter there and it upsets me that you will not stand up for me", and if that means leaving the relationship . . . .well. =\ (Hopefully it doesn't. But.)

I'm also wondering if "Dad won't change" is also buried code for "sure, I love you now, but if the relationship starts to sour, guess who I've learned my emotional handling from?" He may indeed have the fortitude to, when he isn't so starry eyed, move past the emotional abuse that his father seems to thrive on, but if he has, he's also got the fortitude to tell his father to shut the heck up, and LW and her kid have every right to expect him to. And if he hasn't got the fortitude for either, then LW and her kid should get out now.

Enh. I think there are some middle grounds there (and think that on the basis of having had people dear to me move through them), and many of them depend on the REST of the family, how those relationships interweave, how finances work, etc. Families are complicated, and so are our relationships to them, and one relationship interacts with others, and what's at play can have stakes that aren't apparent to an outsider.

I mean it might also be that - that's sort of included in the range of "can't tell if this means this thru that" for me - but I dunno: I get a bit side-eye at the way these things get treated as hardline simple shit, especially with parents. Sometimes it really isn't, and someone not being willing to (for instance and taken from lived experience) throw the entire family into three weeks of misery because Dad has now gone off in a massive snit and is taking it out on mom and sibs and aunts and destabilizing their lives doesn't mean they are guaranteed to go on to being Exactly Like Dad.

(Or even remotely like dad).

It just means sometimes this shit is complicated.

True, all of that. And I'm not really trying to say that this is the most possible reading, but it's a possible reading - one LW would be good to consider. On the other hand, there's also a point at which boyfriend's own fortitude (or lack of) versus the rest of the family's ability to back him up (or not) becomes about six of one, etc.

Oh yeah the LW always has to decide what she can or can't handle (I couldn't be with Jake, for example: knowing he wasn't willing to defend me would make me insecure to the point of Poor Functioning, so!); just depending on her and her situation there is a difference between "Jake is spineless and likely to end up being like Dad later on" and "Jake's father is emotionally abusive and Jake has accepted that he cannot change his dad but has either no idea how to set boundaries or is concerned about what him setting boundaries would do to other people in collateral, and doesn't communicate this well to LW".

One of those means "run for the hills!"; another means, welp, figure out how much you can handle being with someone who's working their way thru that kind of situation. Which can take a long time and really isn't as simple in practice as it can be made to sound in description.

If Jake is really worth it, I'd say put a foot down about going to his family's things. And no inviting the dad over to their place, ever. If Jake agrees to those boundaries and takes care of his own relationship with his father, okay. Awkward, difficult, but doable. If Jake whines about the boundaries--sorry, no.

I mean, okay, maybe "Dad won't change." Sometimes the path to sanity is accepting that your parents will never accept your choices, and that you can't wait for that acceptance.

But then the solution is for Boyfriend to limit interaction with Dad to the essential, focus on creating opportunities to interact with other family members where Dad isn't present, and remove any expectation that Girlfriend will attend events where Dad's present at all.

The really big thing for me is remove any expectation that Girlfriend will have to deal with Dad. Maybe your parent won't change and maybe you have your own reasons for not walking away from them, but asking Girlfriend to actually expose herself to being demeaned to her face is across the line.

And the answer if Dad asks is "because you're mean to her". (Or some variation thereon, depending on what wording will go over best while at the same time not straying from that fundamental truth.)

Yeah. One of my partners has a parent who consistently treats them poorly (and will not change; yes, all of the standard boundary-setting scripts and then some have been tried); said parent is very emphatically someone my partner is keeping a very long way away from me, and is giving absolutely minimal information about me. Parent still routinely makes Partner miserable but, as you say, Partner has their own reasons for not walking, and the extent it impacts on me is limited to the extent I'm willing to deal with it.

This sort of thing can be addressed by the partner if he actually wants to do it, but it means that he has to be willing to threaten to stop spending time with his father and then actually carry through with it if his father doesn't behave.

My step-father's mother was... difficult. She was thoroughly horrible to my step-father's brothers' wives, but she was polite to my mother (and to me and my sister) because my step-father told her bluntly that, if she wasn't, she wouldn't see him again.

My boyfriend's father would have treated me like this. He was a fulminant racist sexist twit and would have tormented Boyfriend's mom constantly about what *she* did to "make" him date a [insert assorted slurs here]. (Boyfriend's Mom was economically dependent on this asshole; insert angry feminist rant about the perils of the Nuclear Family here)

So, my boyfriend and his mom just didn't tell his dad about me. Which was an easy secret to keep since we were in an LDR and no children were involved.

All of which is to say that I have a tiny bit of sympathy and a large blob of advice for Jake. Some family members really won't change, and will endlessly punish other family memebrts --- but that means he needs to take appropriate steps to protect his SO [AND HER VULNERABLE CHILD] from his father's vitriol. Since Dad knows about her, he may need to do other things, like "not being available" for family gatherings, if he can't countenance a direct confrontation.

(Also, one way I was able to trust that my boyfriend wouldn't eventually act like his father was that he made no excuses for his dad and expressed disgust at his miserable nature and bigotry.)

I have to admit, I was put off Abby's entire response by her phrasing of "if he was in love with you and planned on marrying you, he would INSIST that".

You would think an advice columnist would have a better understanding of the fact that different people react to things differently. People with a given status ("in love", in this case) do not all act identically. Good grief.

Abby's phrasing makes me more sympathetic to Jake than I probably should be, too, just as a knee-jerk reaction.

Dear Abby: Boyfriend's dad treats me terribly, and boyfriend won't address it

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject