Prompted by a conversation I had a few weeks ago which is still bugging me.
Background: My DD is six months into her first proper relationship. Her girlfriend is absolutely lovely - kind, sweet, funny, polite, but most importantly DD is happy being with her. GF stayed the night last month - not the first time, but previously she has caught a bus home so I have never met her parents, apart from a brief phone call with her mum.
GF’s dad came to pick her up and was friendly and chatty, but what he was saying made it really obvious that we have very different viewpoints on some things which I think are quite important. For a start he was telling me about his good friend who offered him a spare room for a couple of months while he looked for a new flat and he was proudly telling me that the “couple of months” had turned into over a year and he was not even thinking of moving out because he was able to pay his friend hardly anything. His friend has two children and a third on the way and they live in a two bed house. GF’s dad laughed when he said that friend’s wife wanted him out, but he wasn’t going to go and his friend wasn’t going to make him so she would just have to deal. To add insult to injury, he said the main reason he liked living there was because he hardly had to pay anything, so he had been able to leave his old job and take a lower-paid, fewer-hours one so that he wouldn’t have to pay his children’s mother as much maintenance.
I am trying to balance what he said about maintenance by the fact that he was the parent who dropped off and picked up GF, so he is at least an involved parent. Which I know is a pretty fucking low bar, but it’s more than my DC’s dad ever managed.
Then we got on to talking about sixth form and university. DD has been thinking about what courses she wants to apply for and which universities might be possible, and she has spoken quite a lot about what GF was thinking too. As far as I can tell from what DD says, GF is doing well at sixth form and should get a place at uni if that’s what she wants to do. GF’s dad wants her to leave sixth form this summer (end of year 12) and get a job in Tesco. He said there’s no point in her wasting her time doing any more learning because she isn’t going to university anyway.
I didn’t challenge him at all on what he said. How he lives his life is none of my business and GF is not my daughter. But I’ve got an arsehole ex who wriggles out of paying maintenance whenever he can, although he finds it easy enough to pay for three foreign holidays a year. Plus I like GF, I think she’s got the potential and the desire to learn, and so I would like her to go to uni if she wants - or at least be able to get her A levels. It all got under my skin and I don’t much want to have any more conversations with him.
Obviously I have not said anything like this to my daughter and never would. Equally obviously I am a complete fool for thinking that any future in-laws (I know he is not an actual in-law, but I couldn’t think how else to phrase it easily) would probably have views similar to my own. So how do I make this work? I have read so many threads about judgmental interfering nightmare MIL who push their DC away and I do not want to be one of those, but also I feel that this kind of bullshit should be called out and would like to know when I need to be brave enough to do it. Should I have challenged him? Or ignore? I am not good with conflict and would prefer to avoid difficult situations, but realise that this may not be supportive of DC in the future.