My partner just divulged some of his past to me 3 weeks before we marry

She can talk to her IF the daughter brings it up. She is absolutely not entitled to some sort of rehashing of the daughter’s past trauma simply on the basis that she is marrying the dad. Absolutely not. People seem to have taken leave of their senses.

She's got no right to request that they delve into her private past, no.

A future step-mum is now unable to talk to her step-daughter? WTF?

No! It’s just a pretty big and traumatic thing to happen for everyone.

I can’t imagine never mentioning this at all in a close relationship. Like I couldn’t imagine not telling my partner that, say, my sibling died in a car crash, or that my parent was an alcoholic.

I’d wonder how close I really was to someone who has this huge impactful chunk of their family life I knew nothing about.

I mean, I have colleagues who tell me things like this about their lives. I can’t imagine a partner just not thinking it worth mentioning ever.

The OP has absolutely no right to request a conversation with the daughter about her trauma and her dad. Jeezo. Talk about overstepping.

I would feel the same but from an outside prospective feel that you are being too judgemental now. Many men would do this and not even reflect. Sounds like he does reflect, often and knows he made some bad choices. No one’s perfect but being able to see your mistakes and own up to them is a good sign that he’s a decent person at heart.

100%. If I was the bloke in this situation that would be an immediate red flag.

None of this is the OPs business, it really isn't.

It is very challenging when couples with children split up and the parents are not from the same home country - I have close friends and colleagues, as well as people in my extended network who have been in this situation. It's sub-optimal, but not at all unheard of, for the child to live in one country with a parent while the other is elsewhere. I get how if you've never experienced or seen this first hand it may feel really weird though. Once they'd agreed this arrangement, I am not sure that the OPs partner would even have been able to make many changes if he'd wanted to legally, such as removing her from the country. He could have spent the best part of a decade trying to with other problems resulting.

The only thing I would be focusing on now is supporting the partner in having a good relationship with his daughter now, that is the only part of it which is the OPs business since she is part of his life now.

It is a lot of information at a time that is stressful enough.
The fact he dumped this on you before the wedding suggests he might well be having cold feet to me too. Men often do this to make the other person do the breaking up.

As I said previously, he should have owned all of this before and be getting or have had therapy for it. If he had done that though he likely wouldn't have waited until a few weeks before his wedding to divulge such a pivotal life event to his future wife.

I confess I don't really understand why the "she was an alcoholic and I didn't know" is more upsetting and confusing to you than "I let her take my daughter away from me and I didn't see her enough to know that something was going on"?

Regardless, it also seems very odd to me that you didn't know that she committed suicide.

It doesn't matter what his role was in the care of his child. Ringing children's services if they exist on the other country, ring her doctor, ringing the school of the child are all ways of intervening that could have been done. The fact he could not get custody of her to protect her or watch out for her well being is irrelevant. Did the child receive money from him for clothes, school trips, uniform, shoes? Was he trying to offer some support or passive in every area of care of the child? Was his role as a parent active or passive? Does he take a passive role now in your relationship? Do you have to do the arranging/ buying food/ provision of money, ensuring bills are paid/ food on the table? Postpone the Wedding if he his passive attitude exists towards you. What is he like when you are sick? Does he avoid you/ let you improve youfself or offer practical intervention e.g buying paracetamol/ feeding the pets/ making food? How long are you a couple? Nothing wrong with considering this big step as it is a lifetime contract.

If it was me, I think I'd also want a private conversation with his daughter. I'd want to know how she felt about all this.

And if I was the daughter I'd find this incredibly intrusive.

I think you're being unreasonable, tbh.

Was he really expected to insist his daughter live apart from her mother against her wishes? He wasn't there to see the escalation in drinking and only learned about it later.

Since the wedding is 3 weeks away, I’d pause to reconsider.

It’s hard to find someone who’s a great life partner, and he sounds like he might be the person for you. But he really ought to have shared more with you, prior to asking/accepting marriage with you. I’d want to pause so that I can be sure there’s nothing else he hasn’t shared, to be sure his daughter is now okay and that you’re not inviting more drama into your life (did he drive his ex to drink? Is his daughter going to be alcoholic?)

Are you really saying you think it’s impossible to keep secrets from each other in a family? That it’s impossible for someone to hide their true circumstances even if they live in a different country?

This is a big thing not to have told you, and it does ring alarm bells for me that he would wait to share until so close to the wedding. It's possible he's been avoiding the memory and struggled to share. But I wonder how he'd react if you told him this has shaken you, not knowing something so huge until now, and you want to postpone the wedding? How he reacts would tell you a lot about him.

If it was me, I think I'd also want a private conversation with his daughter. I'd want to know how she felt about all this. She might have a very different view of what happened, and you can't discount the trauma of losing her mother, and the fact that he's now her only living parent, when you consider the good relationship she now has with him. Equally, she might be able to put some of your concerns about his parenting to rest. The only way to know is to talk with her.

Humans don't do everything perfectly. It sounds more like you're looking for an excuse to call things off - maybe spend some time looking into that, and what may be driving it. Trust your gut - it's coming up with a bullsh1t idea to stop you doing something it knows isn't right for you.

This is why men dont open up.

Some people do want to get married for various reasons. Being married brings financial benefits as well as the obvious relationship ones. I know that in Mumsnet land though, all female divorcees have lots of assets and all men are cocklodgers planning to get their hands on said assets, depriving the woman’s DC of their deserved inheritance. So a second marriage would never make sense.

This
On a separate note, why do you want to get married? (irrespective of the past info)

As others have said, this isn't ever black and white.

In the post it says that he had thought his first wife amazing for a long time but realised that her MH issues had come up with a trigger of the death of her parents. Reactions to this are not something that you can predict, and the timescale of any chance of being able to move on from it, entirely unpredictable too. Almost certainly, most people will know someone whose MH has been deeply affected in a similar situation, sometimes indefinitely. It may have gone differently for her, but it didn't.

The DD had also not raised issues with her father until she was ready (and older) - the situation was only based on what he was able to see. With hindsight he has realised that he was seeing only the surface (no deeper things he probed into), and being satisfied with it where he maybe should not have been.

The question is, where both of them are in 2026. I am not sure these things are something you would ever actually 'get over', just that you keep going and things move to become different - again, this is an observation based on people who had sudden and overwhelming life events and trauma at particular times. Expert therapy may help, but not usually in a benign and perfect straight line.

If this is too much for you to take on with this man, then you would need to weigh up what the most decent thing is to do, for all 3 of you, and whether you can see a point where a 'blame' reaction, that has come with shock, gets the chance to be tempered with other feelings.

Exactly. This is her story as well. Maybe she doesn’t want her future stepmum privy to all details of her life just as a matter of course. Just as if someone asked me to keep something to myself, I wouldn’t blab to my DP, even if it was something that also involved me. I know some people think it’s wrong/impossible to not tell their partner everything though.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it.

I don't know what you expect. You're both 50 with a previous marriage and children history.
You have only been together 4 years and you are still trying to work out if his history matches up to your fantasy man.
I can't see any benefit to either of your children for you marrying only a dilution of their inheritance.

I think that at this stage of life especially, we all come with flaws and trauma and various poor decisions behind us.
I'd have thought that he had been open and vulnerable about his feelings about something important. You feel like you've caught him out as not having always been a good family man. You haven't really got goodwill for him or trust him

I wonder if this is really what is giving you cold feet, or whether it's something deeper.

Most people do the best they can do at the time with the information, experience, and resources that were available to them. Years on, many of us will look back with hindsight and wish we'd made different choices based on new knowledge and circumstances.

Then add in addiction and a suicide and a traumatised child. Can only imagine how much guilt, shame, trauma, and grief exists for both your partner and his daughter in the aftermath.

I'd want to meet that with compassion and by who he is now. We are all products of experience. He has learned, and is no longer that man.

It’s easy to be judgemental from a distance. I’m sure he did the best he could in the circumstances, as most parents do. What more could he have done? He had to keep working at the end of the day to support his daughter.

It's his personal, private life. He's entitled to that.

It's also not just his story to tell. His daughter is the one most affected, and she is entitled to privacy for herself and her mother. Maybe she prefers that people don't know about her mother's problems and her difficult childhood, and her father respects that.