Son's new girlfriend may be a fantasist - how to handle

[thedudescocktail]

Hello, please help!

I am extremely close to my 20 year old DS and he has brought a new GF home who he's been seeing for a couple of months and she comes across as a fantasist.

She has told a lot of stories about herself, her past, her current financial circumstances and so on which are frankly implausible. Many of which are terrible circumstances (eg: landlord recently doubled her rent). Others just don't add up.

For example, she claims she is both in full time education doing a BTEC and also claims she has a full time job with a 60k salary aged 19! It all just seems like utter bollocks. Not least because she never appears to go to either work or school.

She also stayed with us for only 3 days, during which 3 or 4 huge dramas occurred. She was frequently running off to the bedroom because she just had some terrible news. It all just seemed not true!

I spoke to my son, who's a bit innocent, and he agreed it all sounded far fetched (as do his friends) but he says he feels trusting of her and very close to her and that he now feels he has to end the relationship because he feels spying on her or checking up on her seems deceptive.

What should I advise him to do? It's not impossible she is telling the truth about all these things, but it does seem MASSIVELY unlikely and I can't work out the possible reasons why she would be being so dishonest but I feel genuinely concerned.

It all made me feel really anxious.

Advice?

What's the WFH job? If she's doing some sort of influencer/content creating then 60k really isn't that out of reach. But tbh with everything else on top she does seem quite dramatic/unbelievable

"I love you son but your girlfriend is crazy, and not the good crazy."

Calling it crazy almost feeds the crazy... I would avoid using that word. Be straightforward and go with "dishonest".

She clearly doesn't care that much about being caught saying contradictory things as she hasn't put much effort into sounding believable. Is she asking anything of you/ your DS that depends on anything she's saying being truthful? Eg the holiday?

It's a marketing assistant role, she says she makes flyers on the computer and things like that

No, that's why I can't work out why she's being dishonest!

And on a similar note, I'd try and steer any conversation away from the concept of "trusting her" or not. It should be more along the lines of she's said things that don't appear to be the case/ reflect reality. Keep it factual and not about her personality.

That’s why I said “personally” … such boundaries as to what is acceptable are different for everyone. But maybe the rest of my post was useful 😯

Ime be honest with your ds about your concerns. He knows YOU are solid and honest. He knows YOU would not be putting him in an awkward position if you didn't have his best interests.. Seeds of doubt are crucial. My ds was in an abusive relationship.. We didn't support their relationship and he knew it. Helped him face it was the wrong relationship.. He had a huge mh crisis. But better than what she had in store... Marriage and dc...

I used to work with someone like this. Not a young girl but a man in his 30s. The the stuff he came out with was so batshit it just couldn't be true .
He's rescued a family from a burning building and got a bravery award ( never saw anything in the local press,, aa it would have been a big story)
He was in the army and served in Afghanistan. Oddly enough he managed to work in the UK as well at the same time.
He's worked on the set of Hollyoaks, again while working in a completely different town 50 miles away.
He has swum the channel.
He must have had some kind of syndrome, he must know that nobody believed him, but it never deterred him from coming out with the crap.
He never had a relationship that lasted more than a couple of months, once they had the measure of him

It sounds like something else is going on for her. It's not normal to lie like that. It's very odd. I'm

She sounds like an attention-seeking fantasist who absolutely loves high drama, and lies through her teeth about anything and everything, just to get the thrill of being the centre of attention all the time.

We know a "OMIGOD you'll never guess what's happened!!!!" type of person. We never believe a word she says. Sad really, because if it wasn't for that she would be lovely.

I know someone like this. They believe their own lies after a while.

I would tell her you know she's lying and ask if she's okay.

A friend of mine had a girlfriend like this. It started fairly benign - she’d been in a plane crash, she was an assistant manager at a premier league football club (I’m changing the details slightly, but similar stories). She also earned huge amounts of money. She even had a newspaper cutting of the plane crash survivors, and pointed herself out (no names, just blurry photos).

My friend was immensely proud of her, and how she’d overcome such adversity to do so well. The first time I met her I knew she was lying, any woman would have known, but he was blind to it at first.

Eventually he became suspicious, and started trying to end the relationship. Then she ramped it up a gear. She’d disappear for a few days and claim she’d been in hospital on intensive care. She said she was pregnant, then said it had been ectopic and she’d had surgery, and showed my friend a huge scar. Her wounds were apparently obviously self inflicted.

He finally extricated himself from the relationship, but not before it had become really quite traumatic. She was clearly very unwell.

My brother had a girlfriend just like this, lived in fantasy land and wouldn't know the truth if it bit her on the arse. Reader, he married her, they are still together after 20 years and she is still a fantasist. There isn't much you can do, just smile and pray that they break up

Has he been to her place? Who's paying for the holidays?

It could be that she's embarrassed about something and trying to cover it up. The income could come from unsalubrious sources.

She is really unwell. I don’t know what you do with that information because you want to avoid triggering his desire to save and protect her from you.

He has been, yes, but I have no idea how she is paying! She said "overdraft" when I asked, but she seems to never go to work!

This is what terrifies me! My son is quite smart though. He is very upset, as he feels she is being truthful, but he agrees he will have a conversation and if she is found to have lied about anything he says it's the end of the relationship.

I really hate that I feel so suspicious of what might be a very vulnerable young person :(

Ok so maybe she dose have some kind of online job that pays well, given how much so called “influencers” and only fans makes, nothing would surprise me.

My brother use to pay some lad at college to do the online material for his business, the lad just did it from home in his spare time.

Maybe she is in full time education, but dosnt bother going, that was me, though between the ages of 14 & 17.

I thought most educational courses required a minimum attendance these days though.

Maybe there is family money… maybe she’s used to getting attention from dramas.

A lot of it is very attention seeking and screams MH issues.

i know someone I care about very much that spent most of their life telling lies, from getting degrees to much much more. They had extreme low self esteem, a neglected childhood where they were basically ignored and forgotten about by parents and siblings, ADHD diagnosed as an adult, sometimes they would just say things because they thought people wanted to hear that, they would get themselves so tangled up they had no idea what the truth was and could not tell you why they were like this. They are a very different person now and function extremely well, actually building a decent career along with confidence and self worth. It took them decades but they were finally put in a situation and had people around them that said, enoughs enough, why do you do this, you’re only hurting yourself.

I think the advice you have received is good, you’ve told your son how you feel, you just have to let him handle it going forward.

Is it a personality disorder? Maybe a need to lie to seem more interesting or wanting attention as she has no self esteem for whatever reason,

Have you Googled her? Maybe she has form /some background info that could prove she is unhinged. Once found out something crucial about a man I had dealings with. Not dv....

I know a few people like this, it's pretty common. Lies about the most mundane stuff. Or the most strange lies that serve no purpose whatsoever. Well, perhaps they do serve a purpose, the person is pretty boring, so these lies give them something to talk about. A friend of mine is like this, I tend to just nod my head and smile and move on to the next topic of conversation.

I wouldn’t encourage your son to end it as doing so might push him the other way. You have however planted the seed of doubt and hopefully now he’ll be more sceptical of her claims, especially if you continue to question her where appropriate.

Contrary to what Mumsnet would have you believe, there are "crazy" women and and a crazy ex is not necessarily a red flag. One of my son's has one - he doesn't talk about her and says that he doesn't give her space in his mind by thinking about her at all. Her behaviour at the time was frighteningly vindictive where she made a fairly concerted effort to ruin his life when he broke up with her. It was like living through a nightmare for our whole family at the time. She didn't succeed but she so easily could have. (In fact, I understand she is now a pariah among her peers for her outlandish and unfounded accusations of lots of other people.)

When my older son told his younger brother though that the girl the younger brother was seeing was unbalanced and likely to drag him into a similar drama, my younger son absolutely listened. We all believed a collective sigh of relief when it petered out shortly afterwards. It was patently obvious that my eldest was utterly correct in his assessment and my youngest was just a bit too soft-hearted.

Is her other Part Time job doing Only Fans…?! Or something else seedy? How did they meet?
it could be true that her parents were abusive but the school didn’t believe her… this could have led to her fragile MH