My partner just divulged some of his past to me 3 weeks before we marry

[Dreamingfever]

First of all, I’m going to be mentioning suicide so please don’t read if that will upset you in anyway.
My partner and I have been together for 4 years, we are both in our 50s so won’t have any children together. I have a DS from my first marriage, he has a DD from his first marriage, both now early 20s.

DPs first wife passed away 6 years ago, they’d been split for about 7 years before that and I’ve never pried as to the details of his first wife’s death, not my place nor business.
He didn’t live in the UK for most of his adult life, he’s a dual national so spent most of his life in Spain, his mother is Spanish. His first wife was French.
He had told me that once they split his first wife took his daughter to France, he spent most of the holidays with his daughter (who was 12 by the time they split), would take weekends to visit her. I’ve always thought I couldn’t have lived in a different country to my DS but I wasn’t there, I don’t know what the relationship between him and his first wife was like etc. He seems to have a very positive relationship with his daughter, she lives abroad still (different country from either she was raised in) but he calls her often, visits often and we just flew out to spend Christmas with her.

Tonight he seemed upset, I asked why and he told me it was the anniversary of his first wife’s death. I asked if he wanted to talk about it and he said actually he’d like to tell me about it before we marry.

He told me that his first wife was amazing for many years but when her own parents passed she struggled with her mental health, when they split she asked to take her daughter to her parents home she’d recently inherited and raise her there. He admitted he had been hesitant about her abilities to raise their daughter but he worked long hours, and felt a daughter needed her mother, so agreed.
He then told me that over the years he knew her mother was unwell, an alcoholic he claimed was what he knew. He thought about asking to have his daughter back, reporting it to someone, but feared it would only make things worse. He said he told his daughter she could move home anytime but she never wanted to.
His daughter then moved to a different city for university. Then 6 years ago her mother, his first wife, took her own life, overdose alcohol and prescription drugs.
He arranged everything as his first wife had no living family she was close to, any only child, both parents passed, and her daughter just 19.
He also sold the property and sorted out everything inheritance related for his daughter.

He then said during a deep chat over some wine with his daughter he learned his first wife had been an alcoholic for many years, she never told him as she was scared she’d be separated from her mother. She was honest about her teen years being difficult, often coming home to her mum passed out, making her own meals, taking the metro to school and back unsure of her mothers well being etc.

He admitted he has felt immense guilt since and always finds the anniversary a hard day.

Now I’m conflicted, I feel awful for him. But I worked with young adults and teens for many years and I often felt the excuse of “no one else knew” was a weak one, I’ve always felt it shouldn’t be a child’s responsibility to know when an adult needs help or they need help but someone should be looking out for them, I feel he failed to do this, he knew she was an alcoholic and failed to both protect his daughter and get help for her mother.

This clouds my judgement of him, I feel I can no longer see him as a the devoted father, kind man, and loving partner I believed he was.

AIBU to feel like this? Is it the past, something to be moved on from? Or an indicator that he may not be the kind of man I’ve been made to believe he is?

I can't see what he could have done, realistically, without everything turning into a huge conflictual situation where he ends up the bad guy.

Personally, I'd judge him more on the relationship that he has now with his daughter. That would tell me all I needed to know.

However, I would be more concerned that you haven't ever had a conversation about this event, which is a huge piece of a jigsaw about your future husband and step-daughter that you don't seem curious about. I'd worry about whether you and your fiance are really close enough to share your lives and support each other if this conversation has eluded you for years.

Also France and Spain have a land border and while they have different languages, it’s a lot more fluid as many will live in one country but drive across to the other, eg for work. This can be hard to picture for people from the UK where you need to fly or get a ferry to leave the country (bar NI). So “letting her leave the country” could have been letting her move a four hour drive away, which happens all the time in the UK.

Plus obviously mum was primary carer, had MH issues, wanted to return to her home country, DD wanted to live with mum. Yes he could have been a tyrant and forced her to stay (though courts would undoubtedly have allowed her to move had she applied) but he didn’t want to do that.

If you don’t want to marry him, don’t but you aren’t owed details of someone else’s past relationships other than if it directly impacts on you (eg Clare’s Law). Imagine if you shared a traumatic part of your past and the reaction was this. Your attitude now also might be why he didn’t open up before, as maybe he feared the reaction he’d get.

My view is that in these situations you need to weigh up competing harms. On one side is the very real risk of a child living with an alcoholic mother. On the other, is the potential harm of removing a 12-year-old from their primary carer and uprooting them from their country, school, friends, and entire support network.

Stability, attachment, and social continuity matter enormously to teenagers. Being separated from her mum and forced to adapt to a new country and school system can be deeply destabilising, even if moving in with dad is objectively “safer” on paper.

It is likely that your DP judged the disruption and emotional cost of removal to outweigh the risks of staying, especially if he was there often monitoring the situation. You also need to bear in mind that his daughter was unlikely to be forthcoming about how challenging things were. He was making a decision based on the information to hand.

I wouldn’t be so harsh about a situation you haven’t found yourself in. You can of course feel what you feel but it’s easy to say what you would do when you haven’t been there. I would take comfort in his current relationship with his daughter - that speaks volumes.

I’d wonder, quite strongly, why the ex’s family (who she’d gone to live near, with the DD) didn’t do any intervening or helping? They were on hand, why isn’t OP more querying why they don’t seem to have been involved with this part of their family who’d obviously ‘come home’ perhaps for help with the very problem they knew in their hearts needed ‘solving’???

No, on his actions as an absent father of a teenager.

How would you feel if he'd forced the issue, taken his ex to court for custody, tried to make his daughter live with him? And then she'd killed herself? Probably you'd feel as bad.

It sounds to me like guilt drove a lot of his decisions and he still feels guilty now.

I'd recommend that you have some couples counselling before the wedding as you can't help how this has made you feel.

Exactly.

The evidence is he has a positive relationship with his daughter, is in regular contact with him, has a close enough relationship to have deep conversations with him, and did well enough in her education to attend university.

Also when burdened with feelings of guilt it is easy to be hypercritical of our actions or perseved failed actions.

OP states she no longer sees him as devoted father or a caring and loving man which is extremely harsh.

Perhaps with one failed marriage under her belt OP is projecting her own worst fears and looking for an excuse to not go through with marrying her current partner.

On a side note I find it odd that OP has experienced this type of thing in her working life, yet rather than developing an empethetic and rounded understanding that life isn't black and white, instead appears to have a judgy one-dimensional viewpoint.

It's his personal, private life. He's entitled to that.

It's also not just his story to tell. His daughter is the one most affected, and she is entitled to privacy for herself and her mother. Maybe she prefers that people don't know about her mother's problems and her difficult childhood, and her father respects that.

It’s easy to be judgemental from a distance. I’m sure he did the best he could in the circumstances, as most parents do. What more could he have done? He had to keep working at the end of the day to support his daughter.

Most people do the best they can do at the time with the information, experience, and resources that were available to them. Years on, many of us will look back with hindsight and wish we'd made different choices based on new knowledge and circumstances.

Then add in addiction and a suicide and a traumatised child. Can only imagine how much guilt, shame, trauma, and grief exists for both your partner and his daughter in the aftermath.

I'd want to meet that with compassion and by who he is now. We are all products of experience. He has learned, and is no longer that man.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it.

I don't know what you expect. You're both 50 with a previous marriage and children history.
You have only been together 4 years and you are still trying to work out if his history matches up to your fantasy man.
I can't see any benefit to either of your children for you marrying only a dilution of their inheritance.

I think that at this stage of life especially, we all come with flaws and trauma and various poor decisions behind us.
I'd have thought that he had been open and vulnerable about his feelings about something important. You feel like you've caught him out as not having always been a good family man. You haven't really got goodwill for him or trust him

I wonder if this is really what is giving you cold feet, or whether it's something deeper.

Exactly. This is her story as well. Maybe she doesn’t want her future stepmum privy to all details of her life just as a matter of course. Just as if someone asked me to keep something to myself, I wouldn’t blab to my DP, even if it was something that also involved me. I know some people think it’s wrong/impossible to not tell their partner everything though.

As others have said, this isn't ever black and white.

In the post it says that he had thought his first wife amazing for a long time but realised that her MH issues had come up with a trigger of the death of her parents. Reactions to this are not something that you can predict, and the timescale of any chance of being able to move on from it, entirely unpredictable too. Almost certainly, most people will know someone whose MH has been deeply affected in a similar situation, sometimes indefinitely. It may have gone differently for her, but it didn't.

The DD had also not raised issues with her father until she was ready (and older) - the situation was only based on what he was able to see. With hindsight he has realised that he was seeing only the surface (no deeper things he probed into), and being satisfied with it where he maybe should not have been.

The question is, where both of them are in 2026. I am not sure these things are something you would ever actually 'get over', just that you keep going and things move to become different - again, this is an observation based on people who had sudden and overwhelming life events and trauma at particular times. Expert therapy may help, but not usually in a benign and perfect straight line.

If this is too much for you to take on with this man, then you would need to weigh up what the most decent thing is to do, for all 3 of you, and whether you can see a point where a 'blame' reaction, that has come with shock, gets the chance to be tempered with other feelings.

This
On a separate note, why do you want to get married? (irrespective of the past info)

Some people do want to get married for various reasons. Being married brings financial benefits as well as the obvious relationship ones. I know that in Mumsnet land though, all female divorcees have lots of assets and all men are cocklodgers planning to get their hands on said assets, depriving the woman’s DC of their deserved inheritance. So a second marriage would never make sense.

This is why men dont open up.

Humans don't do everything perfectly. It sounds more like you're looking for an excuse to call things off - maybe spend some time looking into that, and what may be driving it. Trust your gut - it's coming up with a bullsh1t idea to stop you doing something it knows isn't right for you.

This is a big thing not to have told you, and it does ring alarm bells for me that he would wait to share until so close to the wedding. It's possible he's been avoiding the memory and struggled to share. But I wonder how he'd react if you told him this has shaken you, not knowing something so huge until now, and you want to postpone the wedding? How he reacts would tell you a lot about him.

If it was me, I think I'd also want a private conversation with his daughter. I'd want to know how she felt about all this. She might have a very different view of what happened, and you can't discount the trauma of losing her mother, and the fact that he's now her only living parent, when you consider the good relationship she now has with him. Equally, she might be able to put some of your concerns about his parenting to rest. The only way to know is to talk with her.

Are you really saying you think it’s impossible to keep secrets from each other in a family? That it’s impossible for someone to hide their true circumstances even if they live in a different country?

Since the wedding is 3 weeks away, I’d pause to reconsider.

It’s hard to find someone who’s a great life partner, and he sounds like he might be the person for you. But he really ought to have shared more with you, prior to asking/accepting marriage with you. I’d want to pause so that I can be sure there’s nothing else he hasn’t shared, to be sure his daughter is now okay and that you’re not inviting more drama into your life (did he drive his ex to drink? Is his daughter going to be alcoholic?)

I think you're being unreasonable, tbh.

Was he really expected to insist his daughter live apart from her mother against her wishes? He wasn't there to see the escalation in drinking and only learned about it later.

If it was me, I think I'd also want a private conversation with his daughter. I'd want to know how she felt about all this.

And if I was the daughter I'd find this incredibly intrusive.

It doesn't matter what his role was in the care of his child. Ringing children's services if they exist on the other country, ring her doctor, ringing the school of the child are all ways of intervening that could have been done. The fact he could not get custody of her to protect her or watch out for her well being is irrelevant. Did the child receive money from him for clothes, school trips, uniform, shoes? Was he trying to offer some support or passive in every area of care of the child? Was his role as a parent active or passive? Does he take a passive role now in your relationship? Do you have to do the arranging/ buying food/ provision of money, ensuring bills are paid/ food on the table? Postpone the Wedding if he his passive attitude exists towards you. What is he like when you are sick? Does he avoid you/ let you improve youfself or offer practical intervention e.g buying paracetamol/ feeding the pets/ making food? How long are you a couple? Nothing wrong with considering this big step as it is a lifetime contract.

I confess I don't really understand why the "she was an alcoholic and I didn't know" is more upsetting and confusing to you than "I let her take my daughter away from me and I didn't see her enough to know that something was going on"?

Regardless, it also seems very odd to me that you didn't know that she committed suicide.