To want to tell friend how her son has treated my daughter…

[Watermelon212]

Currently fighting the urge to tell friend the above. I won’t because friend is lovely and her son is an adult (18). Instead when I meet up with her I plaster a smile on while listening to how happy her son is and how well he’s doing, while knowing my daughter is struggling and isolated, caused in part by her son.

Her son has treated my daughter very badly, he has trampled over her feelings, left her in a very vulnerable situation on a night out and betrayed her trust by secretly pursuing her best friend.

They have just started uni, it’s already an emotional time, when you want to make new connections but rely on home friends for support. My daughter is about to have that support pulled out from under her when she finds out that her “boyfriend “ who she thought was into her is now actually with her best friend and she has no idea yet. They have both kept it from her.

I found out through my other child and have no idea if I tell her or not. She is already struggling to settle into uni.

thanks

I think another poster already said it but it does sound as if OP feels that the world centres around her and she has given this message to the daughter.

Well then! Why is it his responsibility? The sooner you stop thinking of your daughter as a damsel in distress the better. She needs to figure things out herself, make her own mistakes, and get herself home safely from nights out.

Plenty of students feel a little alone at the start of uni - she's already on nights out, has old and maybe friends, is in societies. Give it time.

The rest of it with this boy and the best friend and so on is age-appropriate drama that tbh you'd be better off not knowing about. I think if you can reduce contact with your DD, and set her free from you in your mind it might be good. I'm sure you miss her and want to stay involved, but why don't you be the adult here and ask her to just text once a day at most, and that you can have a weekly chat by phone.

Never a good parenting strategy although I see it lots around me.

it sounds like the walking home issue is actually stopping your daughter going out - that's not useful!

What sort of area does she live in? I have walked home alone/ from nights out/ and from night shifts for years of my life including my teens and twenties. All over London/ other cities.

I think it would be better if she learnt to go out and just be wise/ stay sober so she can walk home sensibly - that's a life skill she could learn.

I've actually never heard of girls being unable to get home without someone else it sounds victorian.

She could learn useful things like - what time it's still busy around the area she walks home, how brightly lit it is - where the bus drops her etc.

Clearly, this boy shouldn't have let the OP's DD down when he'd agreed to walk home with her.

But it does sound as though OP is making him responsible for her DD's overall wellbeing, which is absolutely not his responsibility. He has every right to find a new girlfriend and other friends, and enjoy a social life without reference to the OP's DD.

It's understandable that the OP is concerned about her DD struggling to settle at university but the OP needs to take her friend's son completely out of this equation, and certainly shouldn't drag her friend into it too.

That isn't explicit at all. First they were at the event, they were in a relationship.

We then find out they weren't together in a relationship and the walking home was with a group.

Either way no other adult is responsible for another. She had a phone could ring a taxi. Given the clear flashing lights of how off the DD communication may be he must have decided to not be alone with her for his own protection. There were others of the society there.

Have you read the thread. That's not remotely what happened. The OP's DD was out with another group and ran into him and his friends, some of whom the DD also knew from home. She ditched the group she was with to stay with them and go home with them. Them not just him, according to the OPs latest update. But when that group decided to carry on to another party and the OP's DD didn't get the alone time she had been angling for from this guy, the OP and her DD twisted the story to make this poor boy out to be the bad guy.

If it was my DS, I would be very fully impressing upon him to never, ever be alone with this girl. The DD has a huge crush on him and feels entitled to his attraction, then bad mouths him (along with her grown adult mother!) when he doesn't fall in line with her fantasy. I would be extremely worried about what else they might convince themselves was true about my DS's actions and accuse him of next.

I mean, ffs, the OP came on here wanting to know if she should tell the poor kid's mother on him for his bad behaviour. When all he's done is not return her DD's attraction. That's it. I feel bad for the DD too. I've been on both sides of unrequited attraction and it almost physically hurts to be into a guy who isn't that into you. But it's also really uncomfortable to realise your friend is attracted to you and convincing themselves that every friendly moment you share means something else to them. The OP should be telling her DD that he's clearly not into her and maybe never was. That she was just seeing what she wanted to see and that she needs to accept that the attraction was one-sided and as painful as that is, its just part of life. That the healthiest thing she can do is focus on making new friendships and when she does that, she'll get over her attraction to him and be open to finding someone who likes her back. The DD's obsession is pretty normal for her age, but it's not normal for the OP to feed it. Her job here is to help her DD learn when to back off and move on. Not destroy a boy's reputation and relationship with his own mother out of spite.

If the situation was reversed, and a boy who had a one-sided crush on your daughter had followed her to uni and had 'coincidentally ran into her' at an event, asked her to walk home with him when she's gone out with her mates, seems to be making her his only social outlet, will feel that it's a 'betrayal of trust' if he finds out that she has a boyfriend, etc... how would you feel?

Exactly. It's not a crime to not fancy someone anymore. The DD and her mother thought it was leading somewhere, but it didn't. The DD angled to have him walk her home but could have got home some other way. He didn't walk her home. That's all that happened. The OP needs to back way off and stop listening to rumours of a teen romance that may well impact her DD's feelings but by being so involved she's not doing the DD any favours whatsoever, but just prolonging any emotional impact.

A good parent would maybe sympathise that the boy's feelings seem to have changed and then encourage their DD to get on with their studies, and when they felt like it to go out and meet new people and to always be independent and have a safe way home that didn't rely on anyone else. The idea of dragging this guy's mother into it is frankly bats.

I must have missed that post!! - fair enough. I read OP and understood he’d dropped her and left her on her own.

In that case, no - focus on your DD, OP!

Just remembering why I feel so strongly that the OP should really back off - I was sort of the boy in this situation when I was 17 but a bit more badly behaved. I had a boyfriend (lets call him Andy) for a year, didn't fancy him any more (or his weird compulsive lying and overbearing tendency to want to tell me what to wear) and about a month after we split up I started going out with one of his friends (and was with him until I was 26). A few months later Andy's mother met my mother at a party and said (very angrily) that I broke his heart so badly that he failed his A-Levels. I was maybe slightly callous and did feel a tiny bit guilty but my mother certainly didn't castigate me over it. Andy was fine in the end, resat his A-Levels and is now a wealthy lawyer with 4 kids.

Every woman needs to take responsibility for her own safety and needs to have a strategy for getting safely home after a night out that does not depend on somebody else. If you failed to make your daughter aware of that before she went to university, you were remiss.

How did Op's dd and the boy end up at the same uni? It seems like a huge coincidence. Did she follow him there?

The more I think of this the more I realise how insane helicopter parenting has got. My mum and dad didn't have the slightest idea what I was up to at university in the 90s. Yes I talked about some friends when I was home for holidays but they had no idea about nights out, how late I got in and least of all my love life. If I was in real trouble and I needed them, they were there like a shot, but that was literally twice in three years.

Parents are doing their university aged offspring no favours with this over-interest.

This thread has lived rent free in my head all day. I think there are two problems, @Watermelon212, and I say this gently and kindly.

One is that you are hearing the story through a filter, and that makes it much harder to discover the objective truth. That’s not to say that your DD is deliberately misrepresenting things: what she’s describing is undoubtedly real to her. But without actually being there and seeing what is going on yourself, you’ve got to rely on a source that’s not impartial. There was no prior (sober) agreement to walk anyone home, and the situation is ripe for misinterpretation. A noisy club, a group of friends, alcohol, being 18, lots of hedonistic behaviour caused by the freedom of being away from home for the first time. What your DD said and what the boy heard might have been totally different, and vice versa.

Secondly, and again said with kindness, you need to back off and let her make her own mistakes. One of the best parenting quotes I ever read is that it’s our job, as parents, to fill our children’s backpacks with all the tools that they’ll need in their lives, so that when the time comes for them to need them, they’ve got the skills and tools at their fingertips. I’m just about to turn 40, and I remember my first month at university vividly. It was bloody awful and I was utterly miserable. But I was forged in that fire. I had to go through that misery to get out the other side, to prompt action. Being lonely forced me to feign confidence and to go out and meet people, being away from home allowed me to reinvent myself. It was a truly liberating experience. But I wouldn’t have ever had even half of those experiences if I hadn’t been so bloody miserable.

And as an aside, one of those tools in the backpack has to be about personal safety. It’s about what to do when your lift flakes out, or you get on the wrong bus, or you are walking home in the dark. It’s about dynamic risk assessments and judgement calls. Those skills are such important life skills and I’m sure you’ve taught her those, but just to say that it’s no bad thing that her escort flaked out, she’s learned an important lesson about going out.

👏👏👏

The chances of these two ending up together when they are on the brink of their adult lives, is miniscule.

They will meet tens of thousands of people and they will pair off eventually but not with each other.

I pined for a bloke when I was her age but laugh now. We would have been a disaster but I couldn't see it back then. Thankfully he had the brain to realise that we were wrong for each other.

Just wanted to update this thread to say that my dd is doing really well after the initial upset and struggle to settle into uni.

She has gelled with her flatmates and has arranged to live with some of them next year. She has made her own friends on her course and through her sport.

She has been dating someone who lives on her floor who she says is lovely and more importantly treats her nicely and respectfully. She is very happy.

i am so proud of her.

The friend and the boy have split. To be fair to him he apologised to my dd for how he treated her and cooked her a meal to clear the air. She was happy to stay friends. Predictably he is now contacting her a lot again now she has found someone else and is happy. I hope she stays strong and remembers how he treated her.

thanks for all of the replies.

Hi, OP -

Sometimes YP abandon promises to see each other home safely. It is never good behaviour from a young man or woman but it is common in both senses of the word. I understand your concern and I would share it, aside from anything else.

DD also needed to know how to call a car and get herself home safely, and this episode needs to be separated out from whatever history the pair do or don’t share.

I don’t think it sounds like she has lost anyone very special, from your synopsis os the longer story.

If this whole thing really throws her, please let her know it isn’t the end of the world and help her figure out what she wants.

Please don’t expect your friend to step in.

Great update OP.

I am not surprised that the guy is showing interest now that DD is dating someone nice.
Very glad she has made such a good recovery.

Delighted for your daughter.
Hopefully he is in her past, which is best left where it is.