Carolyn Hax: Will girlfriend's mean mom encroach on their future together?
Dear Carolyn: For a year, I've been dating 'Sylvia.' Sylvia is smart, funny, kind, fits well with my family and friends — she is a bright light and makes me a better person.
The BUT is her mom. She demands constant attention and validation, and she is mean. She treats retail and waitstaff rudely and has unreasonable demands. She saw a picture of my sister and said she would be pretty if she weren't so fat (she's not fat!!). Talking about a cousin, she says unprintable things about her sex life.
The mom will gaslight Sylvia for the smallest things, or say mean things about her weight, hair, underachieving at her job — and, five seconds later, pull her close and tell her she loves her.
Sylvia is blind to her mom's meanness because she isn't willing or ready to see it yet. She excuses all her behavior and says her mom had a tough life.
I can limit my time with her mom, but I love Sylvia. What happens if we get married and have kids? I wouldn't want kids influenced by her mom's nastiness.
Do people break up because of their parents? I've asked Sylvia to go to therapy, but she says only doomed couples go to therapy before marriage.
— Anonymous
Anonymous: Not the right question. People break up because one of them chews too loudly.
Plus, her 'doomed couples' view is a rigid, mindless, self-defeating response to a fair request from someone who seems pretty convincingly in her corner. So you have decent Sylvia reasons to question your future with Sylvia, before you even get to the mother.
And that's before getting to deeply serious reasons: that the abuse from Mom that Sylvia ignores, excuses or doesn't comprehend is the abuse she is at risk, in some form, of carrying forward. Her nonsensical response to therapy is a little green shoot of extremist thinking.
Readers with long memories will recall I once dismissed therapy this early in a relationship — so maybe it takes a mindless reflex to know one. I'll share what trained me out of mine, in hopes it can help you with Sylvia; given her intense family dysfunction, your opening her mind to therapeutic care in this small way could be handing her the proverbial file baked into a cake.
First, every conversation about relationship health comes back around to trust. If you have conducted yourself as a decent human — meaning, you treat Sylvia's interests as inherently equal to yours vs. as props for your whims — then the good-faith answer to your therapy request, for your partner, is yes. Period. I mean, really. It's 50 minutes with a health professional. You're not insisting she juggle sharp things.
Trust mechanisms, alas, tend to be the first casualties of abuse. In that case, couples counseling becomes a no — for good reason, maybe even for Sylvia. But talk about a six-word pitch for individual counseling: to be trust-challenged … and dating.
Second, we all bring our stuff to relationships. When it reacts badly with someone else's, that's often a hint to break up. The younger me would advise that; why force it? But now I see how that becomes an easy excuse to hop from person to person, never admitting or fixing your stuff.
It is both humbling and motivating to admit you want to get along with someone better than your current skills permit. Why quibble over the timing?
So, third, for the Sylvias: 'Doomed' isn't from therapy itself, or admitting the need. It's from minds closed to new information.
I hope she's ready to hear you.
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