To want my family not to be friends with my ex

[Starrysky812]

A long and complicated story but will try to summarise as concisely as possible. My ex and I were together on and off from when I was 15-25 years old. During the times that we weren’t together we were (for the most part) good friends. Having been together for so long and over our formative years, he also had a good relationship with my siblings and my mum.

When I was 25 we discussed the possibility of trying again but ultimately we mutually decided it wasn’t what we wanted and we stayed friends. Later that year I fell in love with someone else (we are still together and have a family now) who happened to be my brother’s friend. When I told my ex, he was angry and verbally abusive to me and he cut ties with me. However he kept contact with my family and they kept contact with him, despite his behaviour towards me and despite the fact that I had a new partner.

I had hoped that my now DH could have been welcomed into my family but them holding onto friendships with my ex has really impacted on this. It feels like my family essentially chose their relationship with my ex over their relationship with me, or their potential relationship with my now DH. Especially since he was my brother’s friend to begin with, we were both all the more hurt that my brother chose to continue his friendship with my ex when it was clearly something we were not comfortable with. Time has passed but it’s had such a knock on effect on our family and I now barely have contact with anyone.

Am I being unreasonable to have wanted my family not to continue a friendship with my ex? Sorry this was so long winded! 😩

Definitely not unreasonable to want your family to cut contact, I would also want the same if in your position. I think for your brother though, he’s finding it hard knowing it was his friend and he might feel a little awkward about it all.
Personally I would speak to your parents and ask them to slowly cut contact with your ex as it makes you uncomfortable.

Not unreasonable whatsoever, perfectly understandable and I think your family are being incredibly insensitive and hurtful to both you and your DH. I don’t understand how they’d be comfortable maintaining such close contact after he’s been abusive to you. He has no right to cause this wedge between you and your family and they’re unreasonable entertaining it.

Bit stupid of your family to put any of the adults above a relationship with their grandchild, which is essentially how this has turned out.

That said, I would be upset if my db split with sil and would want to remain in touch with her.

I've been where you are, and it hurts.

But what do you expect people to do if they've known and liked someone for 10 years? It seems petty to 'take sides' and cut them out of your life.

"It feels like my family essentially chose their relationship with my ex over their relationship with me"

They did.

Yanbu.

Thanks everyone. It's good to hear that others would feel similarly in my position. @venusandmars I totally take your point. I think my issue is that my ex cut ties with me and in doing so, he caused a divide because it meant that my family had to choose between him or me (and DH) when inviting us to things. It didn't need to be that way. I didn't feel that they should cut him out their lives but they chose to keep a strong friendship with him, which meant my now DH was never able to be truly embraced into the family. It's a really sad situation and as I said in my original post, time has now passed but relationships have deteriorated. I'm not really sure how to begin putting things right and don't feel it should be all on my shoulders to do so.
Thank you again for your comments :)