I’m posting for some support/advice and a hand hold. This post is going to be long and I’m sorry for that but I wanted to explain the full situation.
Our DD is 32, she met her DP at 17, he was 19. 2 weeks after meeting he was criticising what she was wearing, he didn’t like tight jeans, her crop tops etc, she came in one night to get changed because he didn’t agree with what she was wearing. This concerned us and her siblings. We had the conversation that no-one gets to tell you what to wear, but she thought it was “sweet that he cared”. Roll on 6 months and her attitude was awful, DH, I and her siblings were continually compared to his family, it was all focussed around money. She’d often turn the conversation to earnings (this was never something we never discussed with the children) how many holidays we went on, brands of clothes we wore, how much the cleaner cost, if we went out with her anywhere we were asked why we weren’t filling bottles of water to take instead of buying one, why did we not take a lunch box instead of going for lunch, the conversations were very money orientated. DH and I explained over and over again that families do things differently, we enjoyed meals out and if it wasn’t something she wanted to do there was no pressure to come along. Her boyfriend always declined our invitations to join us. In the first year we saw him 3 times. He wouldn’t speak much, DD said he was shy which was fine, some people are introverts but we continued to invite him to join us and always made it clear he was welcome.
I could write a book on things that happened that concerned us but we and her siblings were very careful to keep quiet as this guy was a walking red flag. She got her hair cut into a style he liked, only wore clothes he “approved” of and gave up her Uni course because he said her career choice was silly. We managed to support her into a new Uni course and she graduated. This was another issue, there was only 2 tickets available for the graduation and we were told we’d need to decide which one of us was going because the boyfriend was getting one. In the end we managed to get an extra ticket but he sat with a disgusted look on his face, barely spoke and the atmosphere was awful. We’d booked a lovely restaurant with her siblings to celebrate. Shortly after arriving DD said she had a migraine and they left after the main course. He could barely break breath to any of us. It was so uncomfortable and felt like a huge black cloud had decended on what should have been a celebration meal. She’d worked hard at Uni and we were all incredibly proud of her.
I should add she was still living at home thoughout Uni. After she graduated they were buying a house. We’d saved for each of our children from they were babies so there was a nice sum to contribute towards a deposit. We asked when she’d like the money transferred as we assumed it would be a joint mortgage, this is when she told us he didn’t want her on the mortgage, but as he was putting in a £30k deposit she was to pay this back by paying bills when she moved in. We did try and tell her she would have no security doing this but it fell on deaf ears. What he said was gospel. To this day, we have no idea if she paid the money we’d saved for her to him.
Our aim through all of this was to keep some form of relationship with her no matter how distant. After she moved in we saw her occasionally, she didn’t post much or react to much on the family group chat. They declined to come to her brothers wedding, big birthday celebrations etc. We heard through people who were childhood friends of hers that they were worried but anytime anyone mentioned the toxic relationship they were frozen out of her life. From what I’ve been told from some of her friends his whole family have an odd controlling relationship. One instance is because his mother disagreed with him he told her if she said that again he’d walk out of her life.
Fast forward to now, they have a beautiful baby, we never interfered, never pushed to see the baby or anything and were grateful to meet her very occasionally for lunch. I’ll add at this point we have never held our grandchild and her siblings have never held their niece. Anytime we did see them it was almost like he was standing guard over the wee one. It was at one of these lunches she mentioned because she was on maternity leave he had her bank card. Her brother after the lunch had contacted her and voiced his concerns about the partner being controlling and said if she ever wanted to leave he’d be there for her. The next day we discovered the full family has been blocked on every form of communication, no explanation, just blocked like we don’t exist.
I suppose I’m posting because I can’t be the only parent in this situation and wondered if anyone’s child has been in a relationship like this? What was the outcome if any?
Sorry for the length of this post, as I said I could write a book on the controlling behaviours we’ve witnessed.