Should my partner allow child's father into house for access?

[Domitianus]

Hello all.

I hope you don't mind a father joining your site to get a female perspective on a thorny issue.

My partner of 6 years had an affair at a difficult and stressful point in our relationship and became pregnant by him. She was devastated and was planning a termination but I found out before she went through with it, forgave her and assured her that I would support her in raising the child as if my own as we had always wanted a child. She accepted this offer but sank nonetheless into a deep and near suicidal depression due to her involvement with this man that I had to nurse her through at considerable cost to myself.

My partner had broken off contact with this man (who lives with his own partner who is still completely oblivious to what has happened) and when she told him she was experiencing a breakdown his response was "You never told me you were a loon!"

After my partner's mood stabilised she decided she had to tell this man about the pregnancy simply because he had a right to know. I and at least one of her male friends were unsure about the wisdom of this (due to us seeing with hindsight that the man appeared to be ruthlessly predatory and dishonest) but we agreed to her decision.

From that point on this man has been relentless in pursuing my partner once again and in harassing me and attempting to undermine our relationship. He has repeatedly emailed and called my partner to insist that she resume their relationship and that he move into our home to raise the child together. He has sent me abusive and inflammatory emails and then denied to my partner that his behaviour was at all confrontational. His behaviour became so troublesome that I had to warn him that we would take legal action. He ignored this warning and we had to have the police serve a harassment warning on him that kept him quiet for a while. Then he started up again and the police took him in and cautioned him.

The baby was born 8 months ago and my partner and I have been raising her in a loving and stable environment. We have offered the biological father repeated opportunities to have a relationship with her. We originally did this in a face to face meeting before the police involvement in which we told him we would be happy to facilitate a relationship between him and the child and would place no unreasonable barriers in the way - we merely wanted him to respect our relationship and our boundaries. He agreed to that at the time and said the meeting had been productive.

Since the baby was born we emailed him and said that if he wanted to discuss access we would be happy to receive a solicitor's letter from him to start the ball rolling. A solicitor wrote to us on his behalf (clearly unaware of the actual history of affairs) and said her client wanted my partner to reply directly to him. The letter was full of unreasonable demands. We wrote back to the solicitor, set out the full fa ts of the case and said we were happy to commence access discussions but that his other demands were unreasonable at this time. We heard no more from the solicitor but he subsequently claimed he could not continue to pay for a solicitor out of his joint bank account without his partner finding out. This is despite the fact that he had previously told my partner he had lots of money saved to buy land for a house.

We have offered to engage in mediation twice and on both occasions he has backed out at the very last minute with utterly implausible reasons (one of his reasons we found out was a barefaced lie).

His goal seems to have been to skirt around the issues until my partner engaged with him directly without anyone else being involved in the communication. He has achieved this and is back to the relentless pressure on my partner that caused him to be cautioned by the police in the first place.

To show that I was willing to be reasonable and go the extra mile I even drove my partner and baby to a meeting with this man and left them to talk for an hour or so before retuning to pick them up. My partner was very pleased as the man had told her he was happy just to have occasional access when convenient and was looking for nothing more. I had my doubts as to how long he would keep to that position and indeed within about three days he was emailing my partner again saying he would accept nothing less than me out of the way and them living together in her house! It seems to me that this man is simply engaging in a controlling pattern of lifting her expectations and then dashing them again within days to break her down and destablisise her.

He can't see the baby at his home as his partner doesn't know about the affair but we have offered him access elsewhere. A friend who lives just down the road made her home available so he could meet my partner and the baby there and that seemed to go well. That venue is still available for access visits. Now, however, he is back to saying that he is unwilling to continue to see the child unless it is in our home, under our roof. I find this utterly unacceptable.

We have set out months ago, and this was made clear by the police and in the letter that we sent to his solicitor that our home is an absolute no-go area for him - yet he is now attempting to emotionally blackmail my partner into allowing him into the home he desecrated with his affair by giving my partner ultimatums that if she doesn't let him have access here he will walk away from the child. He knows how important it is to my partner for the child to know her biological father and he seems to be manipulating this desire mercilessly.

Setting aside any issues of pride or male ego, the very thought of this man coming into our home for any reason or any length of time fills me with utter dread. He has shown no respect for any boundary we, or the police, have set. He seems relentlessly focused on destroying our relationship in order to usurp me and move into my partner's home and he shows no concern whatsoever for anyone else's views on this. I work as a therapist so have some knowledge of personality disorder and I see in this man clear and persistent signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder which is bad, bad news. He is utterly devious, manipulative, dishonest and boundaries are simply things to be ignored for him. My partner understands my concerns about personality disorder but thinks he is more likely on the autistic spectrum and struggling with all this. Her father is on the spectrum and wasn't diagnosed until his sixties so she has seen the struggles that those on the autistic spectrum can face and she doesn't want to penalise this guy of he is on the spectrum. I don't for one moment think he is and he was a lance-corporal in the Parachute regiment (and is a Falklands vet) so I can't really imagine he is too debilitated by any autistic condition.

My concern is that if he gains access to our home under this emotional duress it will simply be the start of a new cycle of Hell for us. We will have made it clear to him that no boundary we set has any meaning whatsoever and that he can break it down through pester power and emotional blackmail. He will simply use access to disrupt our home and push further and further into our lives with his clear agenda of forcing me out and moving in with my partner.

He claims to be devastated at not being able to see his child and that there is nothing more he wants in the world. Yet we have bent over backwards since the baby was born to arrange access and all he has done is dick about and manipulate. It was almost six months until he arranged to see her at all and he has seen her by arrangement a tool of three times in 8 months despite being offered easy access within basic boundaries. He hasn't contributed a single penny in maintenance (he should have paid over £1000 by now) and all he has given is a couple of new small toy gifts and some second-hand toys from the Barnardos shop he volunteers in. This is despite the fact that he receives £750 in pensions a month and was working in a job until a couple of months ago when he chose to leave it because he didn't like his boss.

In the meantime I am doing the feeds, the baths, the nappy changes, the driving of my partner and her baby to necessary appointments, the playing with the baby, helping with the housework etc, all at great cost of time and energy which I should really be devoting to rebuilding my work which has suffered hugely.

There is not a day goes by when I don't feel under siege from this man who I feel is like Voldermort lurking outside Hogwarts trying to charm his way in. I lose sleep, worry endlessly and am probably depressed, yet I keep going. My partner owns our house so at the end of the day she can invite into it whoever she wants and my partner is so keen for him to have a relationship with the child (which I see as him using as nothing but a pawn to manipulate my partner) that I fear she will do anything to appease his demands. To me, him coming into the house, however, is just a make-or-break boundary that is unacceptable. Everything he wants in terms of access can be achieved without that if he is really interested.

I have spoken with a number of male friends about this (including one who is estranged from his own daughter and says this man is being offered everything he dreams of having) and they are unanimous that this man must not be allowed into our home under any circumstances. I realise, however, that they are all male and friends of mine so perhaps their judgment is not universal. I welcome a female perspective.

My position is simple:

1. If my partner wants to explore further this man having a relationship with the baby, I think she is unwise but I will not stand in her way and will facilitate anything productive as I have already bent over to do.
2. Despite that there have to be some absolute boundaries for us, our home and our relationship to be safe and respected and the most important thing is that the man does not set foot over our threshold.

Is my position unreasonable?

There is so much that is strange in your post. For a start, you keep saying 'we', when in fact there doesn't seem to be much evidence that you think alike - are you absolutely certain that your partner isn't still in love with the father of her child, and considering a future with him? Because that's how it reads to me - her depression when you 'forgave' her the affair and wanted to raise the child together sounds as if she was, at the very least, in two minds.

Which of you is the one who is so persistently engaged with the idea of her child having a relationship with his/her biological father? How is he going to manage to live in your house with her and their child if his own live-in partner doesn't know about the relationship - is he planning to leave her to facilitate this? And isn't it slightly odd to expect him to pay maintenance if you are in fact bringing up your partner's child as your own?

So many boundaries are blurred here, and yet the one you're insisting on is that he not enter 'your' house?

In the meantime I am doing the feeds, the baths, the nappy changes, the driving of my partner and her baby to necessary appointments, the playing with the baby, helping with the housework etc, all at great cost of time and energy which I should really be devoting to rebuilding my work which has suffered hugely

This is the oddest bit of all - either you are this baby's father, in all but the biological sense, and you are going to raise him or her as a father, or you aren't. If you are, then the feeding, playing, housework etc are your job which, like the rest of us, you have to juggle alongside your job. How committed are you to this relationship and to this child, really?

Leave the bitch

You need to step outside of the situation yourself....then you'll see things as they really are.

I think your DP's being less than honest with you (and with herself) about the real reason this man's still on the scene....he wouldn't want to move in with a woman who was absolutely cold towards him. He either knows, or senses, that it isn't the case.

Let them get on with being 'mummy and daddy'. I don't think it'll be long before he abandons them both.

There's a reason she betrayed you with this man in the first place....time to protect yourself.

I think this guy is a reaal danger and is controlling and manipulative.

I'm also not sure your DP has the strength to deal wwith someone like this? If he wasn't the child's father, would she/you accept that sort of behaviour from anyone else?

You need to deal with it by following the 'rules' and only going trhough sollicitors. If he can't pay one, that's a shame but letters from your sollicitor can go directly to him (and then from him to them).

I would also focus your effort on yur DP instead. She needs counselling. Lots of it.
And I suspect you need it too. Raising someone else child isn't as simple as saying ''well I'll raise her as mine'.

Are you on the birth certificate?

Ok, so there is a lot going on here.
Firstly, there must be a pretty huge age gap between your partner and the father of the child, if he genuinely was in a senior job in 1982, and she is still of child-bearing age.
Are there some bigger issues here as to why she has sought out, and continues to to engage with, someone much older than her who shows very controlling behaviour? Perhaps you ought to be looking at helping her address the root cause of why she let, and continues to let, this man into your life in a very unpleasant way.

Then there is why you are being a total doormat to someone who is doing their level best to push you away, and not stick up for you on a most basic level. A lot of what you have written sounds like she is happy to sit back and let you run from solicitor to police to appointment like a love-sick puppy, while she stirs things up even more.

You need to park this access issue until you can get your own house in order. Which shouldn't be a problem, because this guy (and your partner) seem far more interested in drama and power games than the baby seeing its father.

what a nightmare!

If it were me in her position and I wanted my relationship with you to work I would be telling him that I have been more than reasonable and if he wants contact he will now have to go to Court to exercise his rights.

He cannot expect to be involved in this babies life on the terms he is demanding - completely unreasonable to expect to come to your house.

he also cannot expect any court to order him contact with his child if he hasn't been honest with his partner - how is he going to explain that to the child in the future.

If on the other hand she wants to be with him then walk away with your head held high and don't look back

Part of me thinks you need to start laying down the law with her a little - not nastily but make your boundaries very clear - if she doesn't like then end

Btw, I don't believe that yur DP still has feelings for him.
I think this guy knows she is the ideal victim for his controlling behaviour. He knows that the child is his way into her house, then getting her house and getting his own way.
His reaction when he was told about the breakdwon is telling. He doesn't care about her but is still pushing to live in her house? Whilst not saying a word to his dw?

And in the middle of it, your dw is trying to deal with the fact she had affair. That that baby is the result of an affair (not easy to deal with! the fact she 'failed' is right in front of her every single day).
She isn't emotionally strong. How on earth is she supposed to cope with this barrage of pressures and intimidations? The best thing she can do is to refuse to engage with him, as anyone would do with an emotionally abusive poatner/father.

This is the oddest bit of all - either you are this baby's father, in all but the biological sense, and you are going to raise him or her as a father, or you aren't. If you are, then the feeding, playing, housework etc are your job which, like the rest of us, you have to juggle alongside your job. How committed are you to this relationship and to this child, really?

It's difficult to criticize OP for that while he is being very clearly given a message by his partner that he ISN'T the father. Or, at least, not the primary father. She is putting an awful lot of energy into pursuing a reluctant father and enticing him into the father role.

OP would have to be even more saintly/masochistic than he already sounds to fully commit to a role he is not being allowed to inhabit.

It's hard to get a sense from the OP whether the partner is unpleasant or merely flaky but she's quite obviously absorbed with herself, the OM, maybe the baby, but she's not really looking at her DP's needs at all.

Fuck that.
I would be telling your wife that man comes no where near your house and has contact somewhere else.
He will have to tell his wife.
If he don't like it he can,fuck off.
And if she don't like it? Then honesty you need to walk away.

Why on earth are you facilitating her bonkers behaviour? She had an affair! She fucked someone else, got pregnant, the bloke has been shown to be nasty, manipulative and lying. You are looking after HIS baby? And your partner wants her baby to have a relationship with this guy? What on earth for?

This is totally screwed up.

If I were you I'd leave her to it. Not your baby, not your problem.

Have you talked to her about why she had an affair? Does she love you, is she sorry? Why did you want her to keep his baby and look after it?

I think your boundaries are skewed. I'#d get out and leave her to it. She made her bed - she can lie in it.

Am reading and digesting all these comments, thanks.

I think this guy knows she is the ideal victim for his controlling behaviour. He knows that the child is his way into her house, then getting her house and getting his own way.

really? If it was a man shagging someone else would you blame the OW for manipulating him away?

she decided to sleep with him. To keep it a secret from her long term partner

I think it's all very well people saying to cut contact with him, but the most important person is the child in this, a child who deserves to know who her dad is. He may be a twat, but he's a twat who your DP chose to have an affair and a baby with, so I'm afraid she has to live with her choice and the consequences. Likewise, you were happy to act as a father figure from the off knowing another man was in the mix and must accept your choice has led to this mess.

Don't let him into your house there's no reason why you should. However you are not the biological father and I don't feel it's reasonable for you to be there at every meeting.

I honestly think you should walk away. She doesn't sound very committed to you, you have the patience of a saint and it sounds like someone else would deserve you more than she does.

Sorry if that all sounds harsh it must do be so hard to go through what you're going through,

Also the keeping a secret from his partner is not your problem do not pander to it! It will also negatively affect the relationship with his daughter, so he needs to tell her or leave

You are in an awkward position if you are not legally the father of this child, you do not have any claim to the house you are living in, and your work is suffering whilst you are helping out.

If things do not work out, it could well be a hard lesson in protecting yourself.

It seems it isn't 'our home' but it is your partner's home and if she wishes to entertain the father of her dc in her own home there's nothing you can do about it.

Despite what she may be paying lipservice to, it doesn't sound as if you and your dp are on the same page with regard to the father of her dc and I suggest you use Report to ask mumsnet to move this thread to the Relationships board.

I think it's all very well people saying to cut contact with him, but the most important person is the child in this, a child who deserves to know who her dad is

'Knowing who he is' doesn't necessarily mean direct contact, or direct contact at this time.

He's not actually willing to have a relationship, or even openly acknowledge his daughter.

Meanwhile OP IS willing and present. But the DW (who one would expect to be immensely relieved and grateful to have such a husband) won't let him get on with it.

*This is the oddest bit of all - either you are this baby's father, in all but the biological sense, and you are going to raise him or her as a father, or you aren't. If you are, then the feeding, playing, housework etc are your job which, like the rest of us, you have to juggle alongside your job. How committed are you to this relationship and to this child, really?

It's difficult to criticize OP for that while he is being very clearly given a message by his partner that he ISN'T the father. Or, at least, not the primary father. She is putting an awful lot of energy into pursuing a reluctant father and enticing him into the father role.*

I agree, fidel1ne, but the OP did, by his account make this unusual leap, not only forgiving her partner her affair, but proposing that they bring up the child who resulted from this affair together as parents - all this despite the fact that his partner seemed less than overwhelmed with delight by the offer. He now seems to think that his partner is pursuing her affair partner purely from the desire that her baby have a relationship with him, rather than what looks more likely, that she still has feelings for him, but seems nonetheless to be resenting the devotion of time to his partner and child.

It does seem a doomed scenario. Surely bringing up a child whom you know to be the product of your partner's affair would only ever work if both people were entirely committed to one another, and relations with the other partner in the affair were minimal...?

While my 'leave the bitch' comment sounds facetious, I was actually being deadly serious. If you were a woman posting this about a man, 99% of the MN responses would be saying the same. Let's not pretend she's vulnerable or lacks the capacity or judgment to take responsibility for her inexcusable behaviour.

It honestly sounds as if you've been lied to; led-on; then manipulated. This is an adult woman who entered into an affair of her own volition. It sounds as if it was with a much older man, and neither had the wherewithal or concern to use protection, thereby not only betraying you and his partner, but putting you both at risk too.

They've then contrived to give you a whitewashed story of events, while keeping his partner completely in the dark, despite the birth of a fucking child!

I suspect your partner still wants this man, hence telling him about having his child, and seemingly pursuing contact in order to maintain a relationship with him. At the same time (from your telling of events), it sounds as if she's using you as hired help to raise another man's offspring. You mention male pride, but I don't see much in evidence here.

They sound as manipulative as each other. Pop-psychology aside, you're being played by her as much as she is by him. I strongly believe you should exit this relationship as soon as possible, as I think you're being taken advantage of.

OP could you clarify what parent details are on the Birth cert, please?

Is it correct that you are unmarried and that your DP owns your home in her sole name?

A couple of questions:

When you found out about the affair, what did your partner do? Was she apologetic? Has she made visible and noticeable efforts to work with you to try and get your relationship back on track?

What does your partner think of this man's behaviour and his demands about contact taking place in your home? What has her reaction been to your distress about his actions and how it has affected you?

Well she doesn't sound very stable Katenka, but still, she is an adult.

Has she always been a bit flaky OP? Do you think she has enough emotional strength to move past all this? Do you think she really wants to?

Just don't let it ruin your life. You might want to start considering what other options are open to you. And if you love the baby and want to stay in her life, you need to look at what legal rights you have and what legal rights you need to acquire.

Are you staying home because you're afraid to leave her?

My action plan would go - 1) Talk to your DP about what she really wants, and how she really wants. Decide how you'll deal with the OM in the future, but it should ideally be through the courts. Definitely no more chauffeuring them around.
2) Present this to the OM. Tell him that any harassment will be reported to the police and that if you see him anywhere near your house you will tell his partner about the baby.
3) Increased security if you need it. You can buy external security cameras that you can monitor by phone.
4) Then get back to work. Ultimately if your partner wants to be around this guy, if that's what's going on, she will be. You can't watch her forever.

YANBU in not wanting this man in your home.
Whatever the legal position I think your DP would be unreasonable to insist on allowing this man into your home.

Have you posted before on mn recently? Your posting style seems quite familiar?

This is your partner's house, child and decision to make. Whatever you think, this really isn't down to you to make a decision on. I would leave, find my own place to live and ser how things work out.