My sister is 4 years older than me. When I was 20, I married my now DH and we have 3 children together and we have been together for 8 years. I have two brothers, one is younger than me and married and the other recently got engaged.
My sister was in a long term relationship with a lovely guy but unfortunately he had commitment issues and let her down big time in the end when it came to the crunch. To everyone’s shock & surprise, he recently married someone else.
Around the time he got married, my sister met a guy and within 3 months, they were talking about getting married. They even began looking at venues. By 6 months, they were engaged and living together. They also set a date for their wedding which is in 6 months time.
My sister has a history of problems, some mental health issues and in my honest opinion, a bad relationship with alcohol. I have been known to drink to excess on occasion so believe me, I’m not judging. If I think back to just over a year ago, she was having a break down and telling me she’d been drinking alcohol every day for the past 3 months. She then told me a few weeks later that she’s stopped drinking and was fine.
It’s almost as if one minute, she’s in a great place and 6 months down the line she’ll be in an awful place. A lot of that depends on whether she is in a relationship or not. I also feel like her personality changes depending on the guy that’s in her life and I feel like she’s lost her sense of self. I truly believe she doesn’t know who she is anymore.
She likes to be seen as someone who knows it all. If I tell her I’m going to learn how to do something (a new hobby for instance) she’ll start telling me exactly how to do it, as if she knows everything about everything. I just try to ignore it. It’s as if she has insecurities which make her feel the need to be superior to me.
Anyway, I’m very worried about her new relationship. I think her and her fiancé definitely have some stuff in common but since meeting him, she’s started smoking again and on a recent family trip, she was really drinking to excess and smoking (out of her bedroom window, with the bedroom door open whilst one of my DC slept in the interconnecting room.
She used to be so conscientious and such a meticulous person when we were younger. Someone who liked to take good care of her health and wouldn’t drink the day before a big event as she’d want to feel good the next day. She is not that person any more and I think she’s lost herself.
I’m not sure the happy persons she’s giving off with her fiancé is true or whether it’s all a smokescreen. Sometimes in the past she’s been on a sort of high like this but I’ve had a bad gut feeling about it and then lo and behold a couple of moths later she’ll have a breakdown.
I feel guilty because I’m struggling to feel as happy for her as I wish I was. She’s moving so fast with this guy, which in theory is okay but I just can’t help but worry about her.
Do you think this is all in my head?