Dear Abby: I found out my dad was married before

[cereta]

DEAR ABBY: My parents have been happily married for more than 30 years. While flipping through an old family album recently, I discovered photos from a wedding many years ago that I had never seen before. Turns out, they were from my father's first wedding. That's when I realized his marriage to my mother was his second wedding.

I'd like to learn more about his first marriage, but it's clearly something from my father's past that I can't talk to him about. I also wouldn't want to sour relations with his side of the family by bringing it up with them. What should I do? -- WANTS TO KNOW MORE

DEAR WANTS TO KNOW MORE: The shortest distance between two points is a direct line. How do you know this is "clearly" something your father won't discuss? If his first marriage was a deep dark secret, those photos would not have been kept in an album. The solution to your question would be to tell him you saw them and ask him to tell you about it. He may have learned lessons from his first marriage from which you could benefit.

Comments

[eleanorjane]

WTAF is with that last comment - "He may have learned lessons from his first marriage from which you could benefit"? Talk about unneccessarily snide...

[redbird]

Agreed.

My thought would be closer to "He might want to talk about it, but if he says something like 'that's me and Jan. We were only married a little while, and I haven't thought about her in years,' don't push."

If the LW's father said something like that, it might be the truth: a brief marriage decades ago, with no children, might not have been important in the story of his life. Or he might not want to talk about it for some other reason. But "he doesn't have to answer" doesn't imply "you shouldn't ask, in case he doesn't want to answer."

[minoanmiss]

Maybe this is Ask vs Guess culture stuff? I know that I couldn't ask my parents any questions I wasn't certain they would want to answer, because instead of just declining to answer they'd get angry at me for asking.

[redbird]

I suspect that's less about Ask/Guess than about your family of origin being dysfunctional in other ways.

My impression is that in a healthy Ask family or culture, the letter writer could say something like "I was looking through the photo albums in the den and I found some pictures I don't remember seeing" and it wouldn't be fraught. Their father could pick up the conversation by saying "what pictures?" or "I haven't looked at those in years, let's take a look," or decline the topic with "oh" or a comment on an unrelated subject. He wouldn't yell at them for raising the subject. (And in a mostly healthy Ask or Guess family, he might get upset at the specific topic, but the child would be surprised, because they hadn't generally gotten in trouble for expressing curiosity.

Hard-core Ask people can find it difficult to deal with "do you think it's cold in here?" meaning "please close the window, I'm cold," but that's not what's dysfunctional. The approach becomes dysfunctional when it's routinely met with a flat "no" or "it's not cold, what's wrong with you?" rather than either agreement or "I'm fine, would you like a sweater?" In a dysfunctional Ask household, the parent also won't close the window or turn the heat up, and the phrasing might be "stop whining, you know how much heating oil costs."

(Abusers will try to use just about any framework or terminology against people: "I" statements are good, but someone who is determined not to listen will mockingly say "Is that some of your therapy talk again?")