Live alone or become a stepmum

[fourdoorsdown]

Been with my boyfriend for years now, we are both in our mid 40s, I am childless and he has an 8 YO DD who he has half the week. I see him a couple of times a week and I have always been indecisive about living together, which he would like although he is not naive that it won't come with challenges, so he understands my reticence and hasn't insisted. I like his DD but reality sort of set in and now I am fearful of regretting such a commitment. Kids live at home longer nowadays and I am basically signing up to maybe ca. 18+ years of having to share my home (which i view as sanctuary plus I WFH a lot), with his DD. It could be a nightmare, especially school holidays. I need to decide whether to move in together and pool our assets. He has a small flat so we'd need to get somewhere bigger but the most we can afford is a small 3 bed flat... Should I bring our lives together, or, live alone indefinitely, or, end it and be single. I love him and always imagined getting married and living with a husband. I feel like if it doesn't work out living together our relationship may be over too. Looking for advice from stepparents I guess or partners of stepparents. AIBU to fear living with stepD?

But life doesn't always work like that, and you are massively missing the point that she's not your child so you will have very little say over what happens. You talk about her as if she's an adult in a child's body - she should understand that parents need their own lives and so on. Valid points but a child of her age is not going to know or care about that, and nor should she because it's not her responsibility to worry about her Dad's love life.

I don't know any parent who is separated or divorced with shared care, that wouldn't jump at the chance to spend more time with their children. And if their new partner said no, or started talking about fairness and boundaries, they'd tell their new partner to bog off and put their child first.

So what are you going to do if she gets to 15 - with all of the hormones, stroppy love-hate relationship and testing of boundaries - and says that she wants to live FT with Dad. Do you honestly expect him to say no? Or to insist that she carries on spending time with her Mum 50/50? Or that she can move in but subject to strict conditions about what she can and can't do according to what you want? And that it's time limited because she needs to be out when she's 18?

I don't mean this rudely but you are deluded if you think this will work. If he's a decent bloke he'll laugh and tell you to cop on. If he's a shit bloke then he'll go for it but is that the type of man you want a relationship with?

She’s as much her dads child as her mums. She could very well decide to move in FT, maybe mum gets a new husband and she hates him.
It’s not about being a mug, it will be her home too! And you may not get much of a choice in the matter.

And fewer and fewer children are leaving at 18 because of the enormous costs now so don’t plan for that either.

Im not a SP and plan never to be. I wouldn’t get involved like that. I also would never move someone else in with DD. I believe that adults should try if they can to keep separate households, I’ve seen a very successful blended families but they are mostly when a parent is totally absent/passed away.
I know someone who has moved in with her BF after 8 years, her youngest is 16. Her other children have left but it’s been an easy transition after all that time.

OP you’ve mentioned not cancelling plans if an issue with DC as other parent is about or should be.

I have small DC with a DH who does as much as me, but we have our strengths and have both cancelled plans because the DC needed us regardless of what the other parent was doing.

Eg, the DC often want me when ill, my DH does better with things like open days or hosp appointments.

The DC needs are prioritised, even if that means a particular parent has to step in for their benefit.

Your DP comes as a package, DC isn’t an optional add-on. you don’t like a huge part of that package so this is not the relationship for you.
In fact it sounds like moving in will kill it anyway as I’d not have a partner dictate when where I can see/priotise my DC.

I do love him very much
I’ve just focused my post on the thing that worries me
if I didn’t love him I wouldn’t settle for him

The problem is that the "thing that worries you" is his child - she's literally a part of him. Realistically you can't put boundaries on his relationship with her and expect him to prioritise your wants, over things like the amount of time he can spend with her, and whether she'd be welcome to live with him or not.

I suggest you go and have a good read of the step-parenting board. The majority of posters there will tell you that being a SP is hard, often thankless and fraught, and a constant state of compromises by the SP for the greater good of trying to maintain blended family harmony. There are quite a few who would probably tell you that it's not something they would do again, knowing now what they didn't know when they started out.

I sincerely hope you don’t move in together. You don’t love this child, she’s an inconvenience you’re wondering if you can put up with. You’d be creating a very destabilising and damaging home life for her. Nothing in your posts even seems to hint that you realise ‘your home’ will also be her family home.

Also, the “one thing that worries you” is the thing that is going to have the biggest impact on your own life and happiness.

That’s not true. I’ve known her for years now. I love his dd, I enjoy spending time with her & I care about her. She sees me as her friend. She’s not an inconvenience at all & for a long time I thought a bonus cos I never had kids , I think reality has set in or I’ve got cold feet about progressing the relationship to all living together when I know I’ll have no voice in our home lives together like everyone is saying .

Thanks for your views on this pp. On the strengths thing, her mum is good at all those things & so I guess I needn’t worry about that so much. I do think divorced life is different. If the divorced parent is lucky enough to find a partner who wants their kid around a disproportionate amount and for 18+ years, then great. But if not, I believe the divorced parent either will either need to make themselves lonely, or, need to ensure there is balance so their partner doesn’t feel too ‘put upon’ i.e. their personal & relationship space taken up too much, so they feel like they can be happy with the living dynamic too. Ultimately if a divorced parent wants a good relationship with a new partner, then they need to consider gf wellbeing & set boundaries with their kid (except emergencies). It’s just what I believe and I could be happy with a 50/50 split situation as long as it doesn’t increase & at 18 they move out. That wouldn’t feel “too much” for me. One pp said housing market is tough - it always been tough, it has for me. But rented multiple occupancy houseshares are affordable if you work FT. That’s what I and many friends did for years til we got paid more and could afford better, i.e. a two bed rental with a friend or a bf. Some have been lucky enough to buy. I also took loans to pay for uni, my accommodation & worked PT during term & FT in holidays. 18 YOs just don’t ‘need’ to live with parents especially SP. Its not fair on the SP.

I think you don’t realise how much more expensive university is now compared to the 90s. I came out with £3k debt, friends kids have like many tens of thousands. Lots of my friends kids are doing apprenticeship degrees now as well which don’t really pay enough to live outside the home.
All the teenagers I know are really struggling to get any part time work now. Friends DD has managed to get one night a week in a bar and she’s actively trying all the time to get something. Friends son has been home from uni since May on holiday and can’t get anything but babysitting.
I wouldn’t bank on someone moving out at 18 now, things have changed quite a bit.

Theres a thread currently about children not leaving at 18. I don’t think you can plan your life around that happening.

18 YOs just don’t ‘need’ to live with parents especially SP. Its not fair on the SP.

That's not for you to decide though, that will be a decision for the parents. While you may feel that unfair, you will be asking DP to reject his child, do you honestly think you could enjoy a good relationship with someone while asking them to not have their child in your shared home.

There are a million and one reasons why an adult child may continue living with a parent, teenage pregnancy, long term illness, struggling with mental health, financial reasons, break-up of relationships, many short or long term factors. Are you really expecting your DP to say no to his own child?

You may just not be suited to live with a stepchild and that is perfectly fine and understandable, but you cannot expect your DP to be willing to share your life when you reject such a large part of his. You write that you love this child but you write in a very detached way as if you expect to be the priority over this child, it doesn't matter how old his DC is, they will always be his child.

Massively selfish. You still don’t get it.

Sit down and speak to your partner. Tell him you'd like to live with him, but he needs to ensure that his child does not spend any more time at your house than she does with her mother.

Tell him that if she ever wants to live with her Dad full time then that would only be acceptable in the event that her mother was seriously ill or dead.

Tell him that she would have to stop treating the house as somewhere she could call home when she reaches 18, because that's old enough to move somewhere else.

Tell him that anything outside of these boundaries would be disproportionate and unfair to you, and that his child should be happy to do all of the above because he's entitled to a love life.

I wonder what his reaction would be?

You’ve missed my point.

mum might be great, dad might be preferred with certain things. Either way most decent parents prioritise their children.

18 YOs just don’t ‘need’ to live with parents especially SP. Its not fair on the SP.
DP’s don’t need to live with DP esp if it’s at the detriment of the DC, they didn’t choose the partner and it’s not fair on them.

Ultimately if a divorced parent wants a good relationship with a new partner, then they need to consider gf wellbeing & set boundaries with their kid (except emergencies).

If a divorced parent wants a good relationship with their DC, they need to consider their wellbeing and feelings (I’d argue above that of a partner as partners can come and go but your DC are always yours) over and above that of their partner.

as for the partner themselves, while they shouldn’t be a doormat they need to accept that their partner should love and want to be there for their DC. I couldn’t respect a man who didn’t look after his DC whatever their age.

You're not understanding boundaries @fourdoorsdown You set them for yourself So you might choose to continue your relationship, but choose not to be involved with SD. You might choose to continue living independently. You might move in, but choose to move back out if your partner has his child more than you deem necessary.
What you can't do is expect dp to set boundaries on your behalf.
And he can set his own boundaries too. He might for example, choose to end the relationship, or at least move you back out, if he considers you to be unwelcoming to his child.

You seem to want to issue ultimatums, which are not the same. Eg, if you won't set the boundaries on my behalf, I won't move in. Which is fine - you don't have to.

Poor child!

Navydeer’s point is very good. Its right and proper for OP to determine for herself what would make the relationship work for her. Set those boundaries! But don’t expect that they won’t come without cost! But she can’t expect her prospective partner to accept her rules of engagement.

The child is not a time share or a pet. She is family, at least to the DP. There can’t be a strict accounting to the minute or the penny for the costs associated with one’s child. Maybe in a divorce or coparenting situation some families keep strict tabs and refuse to be parents in their off hours. But good people don’t put those limits on their children. After 5 on the weekend: call your mum? That is horribly cruel.

OP - I'm coming at this from a different perspective as a single parent to two young children but have done a lot of thinking over the last couple of years about what I would want from an (as yet fictional) future relationship.

The model of relationships in our society is that they need to "progress" by moving through stages from dating, moving in, marriage etc. That makes practical sense if you are fairly young and going to buy a house together and have children. But if you are starting a relationship later and won't be having your own children together I don't think moving in together needs to be seen as an inevitable step required to progress your relationship.

You might want to move in together for all sorts of reasons but there may be an option of just living separately long term. This doesn't have to devalue your relationship or make it less significant. So I'd think about what the positives of moving in would actually be for your relationship (leaving aside your SD) in that context.

I'm less and less convinced that living together is necessarily the optimum for a relationship (at least for me as a fairly introverted single parent). Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity is really good on this. She talks about there being a trade off between intimacy and eroticism, the basic premise being that if you increase intimacy e.g. by living together, eroticism necessarily suffers. That's a bit philosophical but the book goes through lots of examples of how domesticity can kill relationships without a lot of hard work.

Add a stepchild into the mix and you make it even more challenging to sustain a strong relationship. Living with my own children annoys me sometimes so living with someone's else's when you're used to living on your own and are ambivalent about it to start with sounds like a recipe for disaster.

On whether the daughter might live with you more of the time in future, a lot of coparents operate by letting teenagers come and go as they please without a fixed contact pattern - very hard to say to a sixteen year old that they can't come back to yours that night if that's their preference. There may be periods where for whatever reason your SD prefers to live with her dad or stay there more of the time so I think if you did live together you would have to be comfortable with her potentially living there more in future.

Completely agree.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to live with someone else's child full time. There's nothing wrong with wanting a home that's peaceful and somewhere you can relax without teenagers playing music at festival-level volumes.

There's equally nothing wrong with being a parent that wants to spend as much time with your child as possible. And wanting your child to feel like your home is their home, where they can be themselves and come in and out as often as they like.

The problem is that the two are not compatible. And when there is a young child in the middle of it, the person who is their parent must put their child's best interests first. It is not in the child's best interests to live with someone that is only prepared to accept their presence in a very controlled and restricted fashion, with set time limits attached.

I’d echo this tbh. I was with my ex for 10 years and we never moved in together. Came close a few times but luckily things always cropped up (usually his DC complaining about some imagined imbalance) and we’d fall out over it!

My current DP has a 12 yo and I have no plans to move in with him any time soon. My DC have their own space but even when they’ve moved out (they’re older than his DC) I can’t imagine the joy of living with DP will be worth the compromise and mental load that comes from step parenting. Do yourself a massive favour and keep some space there. Read StepMonster for ‘permission’ to be whatever kind of stepparent feels natural and manageable to you, even if that means from afar.

Inlight of your answers .... absolutely do not move in together.

You are not prepared to have her inconvenience your life.... and l feel absolutely the same and would never move in and share my home with anyone else's children

Op, nothing much to add except I can see what a difficult dilemma you are facing. Some good advice on this thread I think.

Living apart does sound appealing whilst maintaining your own space especially with dc but can a relationship truly evolve in this way? A lot of the mundanity is taken out of the equation but I can see how time can be more limited to visit friends/other activities because you are factoring in visiting your significant other rather than coming home to them. Not sure I'm articulating this very well but essentially is it a peaceful and contented way to be or just the lesser of two evils given the dynamic of dc involved?