I (26F) have been in some form of relationship with my partner (29M) for 10 years and living together for 8. He is my one “great love” for all of you greys fans. One HUGE issue that has affected me for the better part of the last 10 years is the discrepancy in how our families treat the respective partner. TLDR at the bottom because this is LONG.
I have a VERY strained relationship with my family 90% of the time. However. They have always treated my partner as a member of the family and welcomed him with open arms. There is a running joke that even when they don’t like me they’ve always loved him. He even stayed with us the first COVID Christmas and my family absolutely rallied with gifts (normally partners just get an inclusion on the card and a token wrap up) so that he wouldn’t feel like crap on the day when myself and my brother had gifts and he just had mine and a few token bits.
My in laws, on the other hand, have never liked me and everyone knows it. SFIL is ambivalent towards me at best and just blindly follows his wife. I first met them 9 years ago when my partner invited me to stay at their house with him in the summer. During that time my MIL (50s F) decided that I was smelly, because I didn’t shower enough - I, at the time, had BRIGHT BLUE hair and was terrified of staining her bathroom, so whilst I actually showered every day, I only washed my hair every other day and apparently that meant I wasn’t showering. This information was relayed to me after the fact alongside the fact that apparently she thought I was a “lazy {female dog}”. She was nice to my face.
We live several hours away so seeing her has never been an issue. I used to show up when I needed to show up and be polite, but that gets draining fast. I would also always buy gifts at Christmas that rarely went acknowledged much less reciprocated. My partner for the longest time would say absolutely nothing to his mom when she started slagging me off because he wants / wanted to “keep the peace”. This went on for a few years until we had a screaming argument where I told him I couldn’t take it anymore and I wanted out purely based off that and the way it had slowly worn me down over the years.
The double standards came in when his younger brother got his first, more serious girlfriend. She was seemingly welcomed in to the family with open arms and that stung a little but I wasn’t bothered really. It was actually my partner who picked up on, and took issue with the double standards there. Some of which included:
1) I was snarked at / almost berated for choosing not to wear makeup to go out to dinner in torrential rain. BILs ex never wore any to any sort of dinner / outing she went on with them and had nothing said to her.
2) MIL invited BILs ex to go on holiday with them / be with them at family events / come over for Christmas but made it very clear recently that I would not be welcome on their upcoming trip / family events etc.
3) I was told I had dressed inappropriately in the house but again BILs ex and I had a very similar fashion sense. The only difference was she was thin and I am not.
And it’s now gotten to the point where even my partner cannot deny that there is clearly an issue.
However he refuses to confront her about it because “he wants to keep the peace” and “nothing is going to change because this is how she is”. But I told him ca. 7 years ago that I didn’t want to marry him because of how he lets his family treat me, and now it’s something that’s seriously on the cards for us I need him to step up because what I said all those years ago still stands. We’ve also had a few pregnancy “scares” recently and I would NOT be comfortable with my child being around any of them for any length of time, especially without me, because I couldn’t trust their dad to step up if they randomly took a dislike to my child because they’re mine. And I need help communicating this to him efficiently because nothing I’m saying atm seems to make sense to him. He has recently agreed to ask her what her problem is next time they speak but he is putting that off.
TLDR - my partner of 10 years’ family has always treated me like garbage and had massive double standards when it comes to me vs the other partners. I don’t want to marry / bring a child into a family like that. How do I tell my partner he cannot carry on “keeping the peace”?
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* This article was originally published here
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