To want DP to put his foot down with his mum?

[Catsandcola]

I’m going to try and keep this as short as I can. MIL gets too involved in our lives, and offers her opinions when they aren’t wanted. Examples are.. when we were looking at where to move to, we viewed a house that we absolutely loved. DP called her as he was really happy and told her about it, she was extremely negative, saying she isn’t happy with him moving so far away, said to him “what about after work if you want to go for a drink with your friends on a Friday? You’ll be too far away” DP is 29 by the way. A few days later she told us she went to the house to scope the area and have a look herself and gave us a list of things she didn’t like about it.

When we bought our house, she came with us to help move and unpack. We were upstairs putting things in wardrobes and she had to leave. When we were done and went downstairs, the whole living room was rearranged. She had moved the furniture around before leaving. We asked her and she said she thought it looked better that way.

Theres more examples of this, but I don’t want this to be too long. I have asked DP to stop letting her get involved, stop telling her things, stop inviting her etc. we are getting married next year and after we booked the venue and paid the deposit, we went to the venue again a few months later to look at the vendors during an open day. DP wanted to invite his mum along to have a look but I said please don’t, she will only give her negative opinion. He invited her still, and I was right. Everything I looked at, flowers etc, she would come up behind me and be like “I don’t like them. I don’t like that colour” and later said she didn’t understand what we liked about the venue. I felt sad about that because it was a pointless comment, it’s already booked and non refundable deposit paid.

She is draining me. I don’t want her to know anything else but DP just tells me to ignore her, it doesnt bother him like it does me, but I think he should say something. AIBU to insist that he has a word with her, or should I say something to her myself?

My DM is a bit like this (not as bad, though) and yes my DH does find her annoying, as do I. She has to have an opinion on everything and make ‘suggestions’. She’s 87 now, so is hardly going to change her ways.

We mostly just listen to her advice and suggestions (occasionally she might be right) and then ignore most of them.

She can be hyper critical sometimes, which can get me down. It’s complicated by the fact that she didn’t know that my DSis and I were being sexually abused by our F when we were growing up and therefore didn’t protect us from him. So this makes me find her criticisms hard to take sometimes.

However, unlike the OP’s MIL, she can be positive too, so she isn’t nearly as bad as that. She’s just overly ‘honest’.

You definitely have my sympathy, OP. Unfortunately the dynamic you describe isn’t very likely to change. People don’t change that much really. Your DP needs to change the way he responds to his mother, and he doesn’t seem prepared to do that.

If you think it’s bad now, imagine what it will be like when you have children ….hell! Nip it in the bud now. Give your partner an ultimatum.

All those asking why OP has put up with her MiL2B trying to interfere and dominate situations, rather than challenging her, are, I suspect forgetting (unless she is much older than her dp) the OP would have been very young at the start of this relationship, quite possibly a teenager, and quite likely started by being polite in deferring to his Mum. I can see that would be an easy pattern to get into - the 'not wanting to seem rude when a guest in her house'.

It is good OP has recognised it now and has the chance to reset the boundaries as they move their relationship to the next stage.