Dear Prudence: My Girlfriend is Unempathetic

[minoanmiss]

My Rich Girlfriend Has Some Really Weird Ideas About How Life Works.

Q. Burst the Bubble: I love my girlfriend but she grew up in an upper-class bubble where being poor meant missing the yearly family vacation. I grew up without running water for several years. We talked and talked and talked about our life experiences and our expectations about our future together, but sometimes her inability to empathize at all just catches me off guard.

I have a co-worker who is a single mom with two disabled sons. I talked to my girlfriend about her troubles getting her super to fix her AC; my girlfriend’s response was that my co-worker should “just move then.” I had to bite my tongue and ask her with what money? Was she going to pay? The same issue keeps cropping up. It is like my girlfriend can’t imagine any other worldview but cookie-cutter suburbia.

She even went so far as to argue with me that it is “illegal” for mixed-sex siblings to share a room. I shared a room with my two older sisters and my grandmother once we moved into a real house. It was a two-bedroom house with my other grandparents taking the other room and my parents on the pull-out couch. She knew this but “forgot” in the heat of the moment.

My parents and grandparents lived for my sisters and me. They sacrificed years of their lives to give us a chance to do better. My sisters and I all graduated college. My grandfather and father both dropped out of high school to support their families. I don’t know how to get around this issue. Ninety nine percent of the time we agree on everything. Advice, please?

A: You’ve introduced this as an issue related to how your girlfriend grew up, but you characterized it much more accurately when you said “inability to empathize.” This isn’t about family backgrounds. Plenty of people who were raised wealthy have managed to open their minds to the experiences of those who are less fortunate. I think the way she continues to “forget” that some people aren’t rich (and then judge their life choices) speaks to her character, and it’s not something that’s likely to change. I don’t have the whole picture, but unless there’s something I’m missing—like her huge donations to charity or tireless work for the local mutual aid organization—you should put a big note in her relationship HR file that says “can’t be bothered to care at all about the lives of people who aren’t as lucky as she is.”

Comments

[minoanmiss]

So I posted this one because of the last one, the one about chores. I had one idea about that one but received quite a few replies which surprised and ultimately edified me. I thought I'd see if that happens with this one as well.

[petrea_mitchell]

It sounds like LW isn't doing anything to burst the bubble. He needs to find out what happens if he says "my co-worker can't afford to move". Whether she acts like that never happens to anyone or absorbs the new information will tell him a lot about whether this is a failure of empathy or not.

[cimorene]

This.

[jadelennox]

yeah, there's not enough information here to know if she lacks empathy, because it's not clear he's ever asked her to talk about it. Empathy is different from knowing things aren't universal. I was saying shit about why don't people just move as late as katrina, when I was in my early thirties.

[ioplokon]

I suspect they do not agree 99% of the time bc why did lw have to bite their tongue instead of being like, 'they can't afford to move '? and then it seems like things blow up a lot.

like gf seems like a jerk but also these arguments seem like they're just the tip of the iceberg of their communication issues as a couple. it sounds like what happens is gf says something kind of ignorant, lw is like, 'that's messed up but i won't say anything', and then gf keeps going until the dam bursts & then everyone is super combative.

I think intervening earlier would possibly help, though maybe that has gone poorly in the past & that's why they're in this pattern now. in which case it's probably time to rethink the relationship.

[green_grrl]

It sounds to me like he’s given the “poor family” viewpoint over and over and over again and is at the point now of giving it up as a lost cause.

[minoanmiss]

yeah, this is what I waw thinking. It may be my viewpoint but he sounds not so much tightlipped as exhausted.

[ioplokon]

right but during the relationship or during LW's life? i think probably the former, but if the latter, maybe there's some hope for them.

[green_grrl]

The way he said he’s talked and talked and talked about his life experiences made me think he’s painted a very vivid picture to her of what life was like for him/people without money… then his gf says people just like his parents and grandparents should be put in jail for being too poor to afford more bedrooms.

[melannen]

LW, if you really love this woman, you gotta have some empathy for the fact that she doesn't have the deep-down knowledge you do of how you grew up, and give her some patience to let her rework some fundamental things she thought she knew. It's not a fast process!

On the other hand, if you're out of patience with this woman, and you think she's incapable or unwilling to accept that the way she was raised insulated her from knowing about how you were raised, and that bothers you a lot, you need to dump her.

Those are basically your options.

Talking about "empathy" in this kind of situation, though, is nearly always counterproductive in my experience. "Caring about whether other people feel bad", "Understanding that other people may not always feel the same way you do", "Having the background knowledge to be reasonably accurate about how other people may feel", and "Having the social skills to interact with other people around emotionally complicated things" are very different things and talking about "empathy" in a way that conflates them all makes it hard to move forward. Needing more time to integrate things she's learned about being poor vs. not understanding that it's important to you vs. not caring are three different problems that need different responses, although it's certainly possible that she may have all of those problems at once.

[laurajv]

exactly! it is not at all clear which problem LW's girlfriend has, and I'm not sure LW knows, either, because the Communication Problems these two have are screaming off the page.

[ayebydan]

Hmmm I am also suspicious of LW here because, in many places 'mixed sex siblings' are not supposed to share rooms. Just because LW did doesn't mean it was legal. It is very possible the authority thought gran or mum and the sisters were in one room and he/grandad and various combos were in others. That is certainly the law where I am.

[finch]

I am incredibly curious what places in the world it is illegal and exactly how the laws work around it. If you happen to know, could you share? I tried googling and couldn't find anything about it actually being illegal.

[ayebydan]

Scotland. It is far harder to go after people who own their own homes but the council have to rehome people once the kids hit a certain age as they can't share rooms or the mother and daughter would have to be in one room and the male sibling in another until a bigger home is acquired. My neighbour is set to be moved because of this and my great and was in a room with her granddaughter for years due to it. In another part of my family my cousin slept on the couch for years until her son got old enough to get his own place because the council never got them a big enough place in the interim.

[finch]

Thank you for responding! I have so many questions and can only find guides to what council housing allows; no wonder I couldn't find anything to begin with.

[taimatsu]

I think it’s less that it’s actually illegal, and more about what government-provided housing has to offer. If you own your flat and you have your son and daughter sharing a room, nobody is going to come and arrest you or indeed care at all really. But if you are in a council-provided home and you have a son and daughter then after a certain age the housing provider has to make sure the brother and sister can sleep in separate rooms. They can’t (shouldn’t legally, obviously in practice is a bit different) leave you in housing where older mixed-sex siblings have to share.

[jadelennox]

I've known mixed sex siblings who shared rooms. It's normal if you have a small apartment.

[lilysea]

I knew a middle class family with three bedrooms where mixed sex siblings shared a room.

Bedroom 1 = parents

Bedroom 2 = eldest daughter, who needed a quiet study space for schoolwork

Bedroom 3 = other daughter, son (bunk bed)

[feldman]

LW, as someone in a decades long relationship of working class + upper middle, you will both need to build skills to bridge these disconnects. This will be a chronic issue as you move through life together, because you both harbor assumptions that can trip you up, and you will obliviously poke each other in tender places. This wide spread between experiences can also be a powerful source of strength and resiliency.

You both will need to be thoughtful and curious about the other's point of view, reflective and reflexive about your own, and be willing to break things down with each other and craft a synthesis of shared values together.

She may have the knowledge of your history, but surviving in poverty is a constant terrifying pressure of not enough resources, and she does not have those patterns of thought. And our society offers many mental evasions to distance, to cast blame, to reassure those with money and success that they earned and deserve them (and as long as they play along, they'll get to keep them).

This doesn't mean she's always wrong, either, or that your role is to be her disapproving instructor. There are head trips a-plenty for both of you to identify and unravel.

[minoanmiss]

This reply is orders of magnitude wiser, more thoughtful, and all around better than Prudie's.

[feldman]

Aww shucks, thanks :)

That's been our process over the years, but we're also both into stuff like social sciences, history, politics, genre and world building, so we had the interest and conceptual tools. We're also both kinda class traitors to begin with.

Mainly, is the girlfriend even interested in learning to stop whistling past the graveyard? This pandemic we've been doing a lot of deep talks, and I've learned how many of my "haha, life, amirite?" anecdotes Mr. F had straight out been labeling "trauma" (and therapy is underlining the accuracy his judgement, hence my bloviating all over this post). BUT ALSO how much unspoken fear Mr. F's family had about ever being in my family's circumstances.

So also: is LW willing to examine his own family's noble sacrifices in light of the trauma and weight of deferred potential that comes with them, still on his shoulders today? Can LW trust GF to be reliable when shit gets real and money can't fix it? Can LW handle the guilt and shame when money *can* make a problem go away that would have had generational impact without it? Can LW appreciate that his models of love and commitment might be skewed by the human sacrifices demanded by circumstances?
(edit for typo)