Saigon Slick wrote:AITA
Long story short me and my dad don’t get on very well, he’s got a very long history of manipulation against my mum and had multiple affairs over the space of about ten years that ultimately led to the end of their marriage.
Within the last year or so I’ve very tentatively gone to the pub with him a few times, for football games etc. This has been spurred on a bit by my wife, who has arranged a night tonight, for the UCL matches and Swansea vs. Blackburn at our local pub, in my hometown.
My dad’s new partner is a bit...obsessive? In May and June she started pushing me and my brother very hard to meet her and her kids, to spend time “as a family” before our respective weddings. We both declined, politely at first and then more forcefully when she pushed the issue, citing our already fractured relationship. Speaking with my aunt, it seems like she has a history of attention seeking behaviour.
By the sounds of it, she’s demanded that she be allowed to come to the pub tonight. She simply doesn’t understand why I’m not interested in being her friend. My wife’s had to drop out of the meeting as she had a bad Tourette’s attack last night(painful twitching down one side of her body).
Now to be fair on my dad, he’s said that he’s not gonna push the issue of her attending if I genuinely don’t want it. It’s manipulative that he even mentioned it in the first place and I can see through it, but he’s covering his own arse and I can understand that.
On many levels I feel bad that I’m intentionally excluding someone who desperately wants to be involved. But also, I don’t feel that I’m wrong, given the history and the reports I hear, to be extremely wary of both him and her.
Tl;dr am I the arsehole for not wanting to build a relationship with my dad’s new partner?
I just saw this. This really resonates with me, so as a man who's about to turn 31 and is still dealing with this crap over two decades later, and was really conforming in the way your dad's girlfriend wants you to be for most of my childhood (until I was about 16, so 11 years of bullshiting my way past being upset with both of them) I'll try to explain my experience and things I've learnt and general attitude which has taken me forever to think about.
NO, you do not owe your father or his new wife together or as an individual any kind of "real family" type experience/deal to make them feel comfortable. You don't have to waddle along to pub meetings and large loud and expensive lunches with lots of friends (which, by the way, is a way to prevent confrontation in a public space, to set the bar high enough that you're less likely to break the rules and embarrass them, but strawberry float them) so they can parade around their relationship as a facade that everything is OK and everyone accepts us, so let's get along with US being happy. strawberry float that. I really mean this, they can strawberry float off if that's what I anticipate is coming your way. The result of this if you don't understand your feelings yet and possibly never will, because it's an awkward as strawberry float situation manufactured by other people who did not factor you in or care about how you felt about it as the "original" family - so the groundwork/history for all this (as well as your dad being a manipulative prat much like mine it seems, who kind of just "ERROR ERROR"s when things don't go his way) - you can get paranoid and miserable, generate self-doubt and hatred and guilt, all because you're not "happy" and "pleasant" enough for the parent/new partner who
so desperately wants to legitimise this relationship most probably because they can't fess up to themselves that it was born out of purely selfish intentions, and so require everyone else to adapt instead or you're a
bad actor. I call bullshit.
(I have read plenty of medical literature by the way on how men especially are MASSIVELY more likely to suffer lifelong depression problems because they are forced to temper their feelings for the benefit of just one other man - your father. As well as fathers being absent in general because they do whatever the strawberry float they want.)
They are acting. Don't get swept up in it. Don't become part of the lie. It will only form the foundation of their world view that everything's cool and make you miserable. That's how this kind of pressure and painting of others, effectively white-washing other's emotions by guilting them out of their own feelings and own sense of self, including right and wrong, works if you let it. This just turns into resentment and builds up over many many years effectively destroying huge swathes of otherwise positive interactions you might have and deserve to have with your father. You father might choose who he strawberry floats outside of his familial commitments, to be frank, but he CANNOT choose his children and the fact that they love him and need him, even if he doesn't feel the same way. That's a huge difference between children and parents. It's always the parents who think they can dick around with their responsibilities in my experience, because they're "grown-ups" with "lots more experience" and they understand these things etc. etc. and they are therefore afforded (and often afford themselves) far more emotional privileges to stomp around than they deserve. Especially after their kids are full grown people who deserve to be heard and treated as equals themselves, but rarely are because in their mind, you're still their product and their thing to form and take responsibility for - taking agency away from you and your right to be an individual and stick to your own values. Their values are simply not relevant anymore. If you fail to do that, to comply, there's this eternal sense that you are failing them in some way, even when you're 20, 30, 40 years old. You are NOT failing them. You've simply become your own person, and they can take it or leave it.
It honestly amazes me how little mutual respect there are in some parent/child relationships, even into adulthood, as I have experienced. Parents wallow in their own self pitty or personal failures and guilt children into feeling bad about that, when it had absolutely strawberry float all to do with you most of the time, because what led to those feelings they have, you weren't around, weren't capable (i.e. were a child), or didn't even exist! That extra-marital step parents (or "partners") can also try to do this, is incredible.
Tbh sometimes they just grow up to be banana splits, gits, old biddies and don't really give a strawberry float about the kids - or their partners behave this way. They become detached and lost in their own weird reverse adolescent way, do stupid and childish things in pursuit of changing or repairing aspects of their life they're unhappy with, forgetting about their dependents, or which you (or more evidently the partner they "put up with all those years, y'know, for the kids" etc etc) got in the way of somehow or another. People get old and resentful but want everyone to be carefree and easy about how they behave or "I'll come down hard on you" or whatever. Nope.
My father was the same, highly manipulative, a liar, a cheat, multiple affairs and left my mum albeit when I was only 5 and my brothers 10 and 2. Except it was largely him implying in many ways that we had to "accept" the new wife/girlfriend (as they weren't actually married until 11 years later), to the extent that he threatened not to see my elder brother anymore if he didn't accept the new wife.
In my experience you will unfortunately always live with this pressure to "get along" with the new "mum"/wife/partner, but you had no part in choosing her - your father chose her and was unfaithful by his own volition which was itself wrong. You don't need to make any concessions or any adjustments to your expectations of people or how you feel things ought to be, and you deserve a relationship with your father without it having to be 100% in tandem with the new wife at all times, otherwise you are somehow immature/disrespectful/stuck-in-the-mud/"living in the past"/unable to "move on" blahblah all various shite that will probably get fed to you if you fail to comply with accepting the new relationship dynamics.
So, it's good to see your dad at the pub, but if the new wife is being preachy and pressuring about wanting a "family" experience, that is her desire and her delusion that this is normal and totally OK and "right" that you must allow that etc. It's all about her or their happiness, where only yours matters to you. If you don't like her or feel she's pressuring you or invasive in any way then she can strawberry float off, the best thing to do is to just ignore her or be very work-like about it and cordial. You can acknowledge her but you DO NOT have to "like" or "accept" her.
And believe me it's for the best to be very assertive about how YOU want to see your dad and you don't HAVE to see her as well. Just focus on how you value the relationship you have (with your dad) but that sometimes you just want to see your dad, just like sometimes you just want to spend time with your mum, whether they were/are together or apart isn't relevant. Maybe you want to go for a drive or a drink with your dad and talk about, whatever you have in common. That's a normal father/son relationship. What he will try to do is shoehorn her in at every opportunity to please HER (and therefore him, as he feels this is a good deed) and he knows this will temper you in order to behave in a way that is convenient for him and positively reinforces them. That is not fair so be outspoken and say what you want. You don't have to even like (or even know) your biological parents, nevermind an extra one that's been shoved into the picture for you.
Sometimes it's OK to spend time with one parent if you're not getting on with the other or one has different skills and things to offer as person than the other - especially when they're separated, that isn't your fault! It's really difficult to work with and I've been dealing with it for 25 years, I have little to pretty much no experience of anything else but this sordid complex levied on me for vast majority of my lifetime and it will not go away. But what you can do is speak up about what your emotional needs are and never ever feel bad about putting those first over whatever semblance of "family" the new couple want to emulate. When I was a kid I was extremely forgiving about everything, automatically, to a fault, the thing was I hadn't developed my own identity and I was brought up in this environment to accept gooseberry fool is just what you get so get on with it. I later rejected that and decided, no, there are things I want and deserve, standards I want that if I can't get them I will create for myself. I might not get all of those things but I can still want them, even if they were taken from me. I.e. parents that actually get on and aren't little gooseberry fools all the goddamn time and constantly whining about each other or trying to plaster stuff over because they've never been capable of dealing with their own relationship problems (and hence split up).
The most succinct way I have put this and I've started to for the first time in my life actually started saying this out loud to people, is that you're allowed to have feelings. People will say you're unreasonable, or oversensitive, or acting out, or even aggressive or other crap. No, that is them denying your right to feel the way you do about what has happened, something you had no control over. They are expecting you to quell and control and temper your emotions in order to present in a way that is convenient for them. Did anyone ask you how you felt about the family unit breaking up? Of course not. Your feelings didn't matter. Did anyone ask you how it could be made, in any way, easier for you to deal with this rift in the family emotionally? Most likely not. Kids just have to strawberry floating deal with it. strawberry float that gooseberry fool. Stand up for yourself. You deserve a voice about those feelings and you deserve to be heard if you choose to express them, in any way you see fit. If you are not comfortable spending time or seeing the new partner then don't, and tell them that and why. They cannot tell you that your feelings in this regard are right, or wrong. They have to accept them as you are as that is a fundamental part of who you are. Trying to change that is just more manipulation and you cannot allow yourself to feel guilty for it. If you feel guilty, those are the ONLY emotions you should ignore in this situation because you owe that relationship (their relationship) absolutely strawberry float all.
I hope you see and have a relationship with your dad, it's certainly better than none and I've gone long bouts (sometimes years) seriously pissed off with my dad being basically a gooseberry fool dad. But don't let this whole charade start by giving into the whims of this pamby, wanton woman-cum-2nd-mother, it seems, who wants that rosy picture. You don't owe it to her. So don't give it up without a fight. She should earn your respect and get to know you like a normal person. And if that means getting to know the reality that you don't want to know her, like some prick or bint in the office, that's fine too. It's not your problem. It's theirs.
You may feel you owe your father some respect and happiness - no-one
wants their parents to be unhappy and that's a bit different, but you certainly needn't feel that way about his bloody girlfriend. If they're unhappy because you don't spend time together "as a family" that is most probably their own damn fault. Don't allow her to use that against you if you feel that way. Use those emotions to pursue a positive relationship with your dad, which is helpful and healthy. But don't let it be weaponised against you because of some nuclear family bullshit when it is so obviously not that. If you can do that, she should back down and forget about it, which is just 12 year old princess fairy bullshit surging up and maybe weird hormone gooseberry fool. That is not going to happen in this situation of a "modern"/fractured/extended family which does not and cannot function the same way as in the storybooks and movies. I think in these situations the kids have to step up and set the record straight by example. Not get trodden over by the whimsical desires of what two incompatible / forcefully rejected parents and their rebound projects want from you.
I'll stop there because I won't have anything left for the therapist if I finally find one. And yes, for the first time I'm getting my dad to pay for it.
After 25 strawberry floating years! Heed my words if they make sense to you and all the best.
)
