Partner besotted with his adult daughter.

[Netcurtainswithlead]

Another post on here has prompted me to write this.

I have ended my relationship of a year in the last few days but want some other people’s views and experiences as I’m having some difficulty getting my head around this.

Boyfriend was 15 years older than me. He was divorced and had adult married daughter 15 years younger than me.
I gradually became aware that he was besotted with her. If anyone has seen A Bouquet of Barbed Wire it was like that. He had her picture as his screensaver, took her as his plus one to social dos instead of me sometimes, went on holiday with her and her baby staying in a family room and bought her gifts that I would have thought were more appropriate for her husband to buy her. I used to think he liked to play happy families with her and her baby. They had shared a bed on holiday many times when she was a teenager, he told me this. She was brought up very privileged and her husband didn’t earn much, they struggled for cash and my BF gave her a lot of money. I began to feel he talked about her as if she were his wife. He told me many times that she didn’t like me and she would not go to his house if I was there even though we only met briefly a couple of times. I had done nothing whatsoever ever to warrant this.

I’m not asking if people think this was an inappropriate relationship between my BF and his daughter because in my opinion it was. What I want to know is if anyone else has experienced anything similar.

You are right to have ended it @Netcurtainswithlead

I spent Xmas with the brother and extended family of an ex and the behaviour of his uncle and his uncles daughter (his cousin) was gut churning. As soon as I read your OP, I was taken back to that Xmas.

She was about 24 if memory serves. An adult with a job etc. but she spent 90% of the time I was there, sitting on his lap and being all over him as if they were lovers.

It was clear the rest of the family were vaguely used to this but the brother's girlfriend was not and I found it gut churning and had to force myself to look ahead and ignore everything at the side of my vision. His wife was ignored by the pair of them the whole five days I was there.

On day 2 the brothers girlfriend asked me to walk in the garden with her and as soon as we were away from the house, she asked me WTF I thought of this pair as she was struggling to stay composed. We decided it was not our place to say anything but agreed it was interesting to see everyone else just 'not noticing' their obvious behaviour and we laughed that we had another three days of this to endure.

I left my ex the following year and never saw this pair or the like since but it stuck in my mind as it was super awkward. My Dad was loving to me but only in the 'mend my bike', 'make me a go-cart', 'here's the deposit for your house' sort of way. Nothing handsy.

Who knows! Hopefully her husband would speak up if anything was inappropriate

Sort of but I noped out very fast he was so (obsessed isnt the right term) rigid in his thinking that he refused a coffee date with me because she "might" need a lift to her mother's house from college for context her mother's was 1.5 miles away from where the coffee date was and her college was around the corner from where I suggested coffee! He lived around the corner from her mother's anyway so technically we were closer to her but no! He wanted to stay in his house by the phone just in case his 20 year old daughter needed a lift to her mother's (yes he had a mobile phone too)

I thought this is not going to change and I am not dealing with it 👋

To my mind it was perfectly acceptable behaviour go on a coffee date leave if your daughter needs a lift as long as we both knew that might happen what's the issue

I’ve known it the other way round, mother with her son, but it wasn’t quite to that extreme.

Well done for getting out sooner rather than later.

This seems, normal? Gifts for his daughter and grandchild, holidays together as a family (which they are) etc. normal.

Sharing a bed seems to be acceptable as it appears he spoilt her, and then had no money for larger rooms. I can’t see an issue with any of this, unless there is something amiss you’ve not said and you witnessed?

If she is also prioritising her father in the way he prioritises her, it won't last.

Look up Emotional Incest.
It can happen with mothers and sons as well as fathers and daughters.
You've made the right decision by ending the relationship.

Not great for the daughter's ability to form healthy relationships based on mutual respect either if she's used to being pandered to and spoiled.

My friends sister always let her mother share her bed when she came to stay. I felt a bit sick (and so did my friend) when she revealed they also spooned.....naked. Boob to back - grim 😧

Well none of us will ever know 🤣

Not sure I see anything wrong based on what OP had posted.

I have had a very similar experience to you OP with a very similar age gap.

Dated a man 15 years older than me (I was 45, he was 60, his daughter was 25 and had a baby, a single mother).

I have kids myself (teenagers) so completely understand the need to be there for your children even when they are growing up and away from you, you never stop being a parent.

However, the enmeshed relationship he had with his daughter made me very, very uncomfortable. He literally did everything for her to the point I could see his infantilisation of her was actually preventing her from becoming a secure, independent adult. He also took on the father role to her son and the family dynamic there (when he should have been the grandparent, not the dad) made me feel very weird. Dont get me wrong - there was no suggestion of anything sexual or anything but the role playing of her as mum and him as dad was just completely psychologically unhealthy.

He even told me he wished he had been her birth partner when she had given birth to her son - comments like that etc. He would drop any plans we had to go to her beck and call no matter how trivial the reason and I could clearly see she had come to depend on him to the point she really couldnt manage life on her own which isnt healthy at all. I wasnt uncomfortable about the fact that he was supporting her - on the contrary, thats what good parents do, it was the manner and way of it happening that became unhealthy and we ended up splitting up. We stayed in touch as friends.

She is apparently now dating someone and he often makes snide remarks about this new guy and is clearly very jealous of him. Since dating me, he has remained unhappily alone despite trying to date other women. I strongly suspect this is why he remains single. I think there is a level of enmeshment there that is most certainly unhealthy.

“But is her primary relationship with her husband or her father.”

I think this is key. It’s usual for adult children to eventually form closer relationships with people other than their parents -in some cases that doesn’t happen.

Some posters are taking a polarised response almost implying the only two categories are incest or a healthy relationship. Maybe there’s a whole sliding scale in-between? There are all sorts of possibilities including enmeshment, codependency etc.

You were uncomfortable with where your partner and daughter’s relationship was on that scale and it was not right for you. I guess other people may be comfortable with it- but maybe a minority.

You asked for any similar experiences. I have something vaguely similar with my partner of five years. but it’s not the same. With you the attached behaviour seemed to be coming mostly from your ex and not his daughter. With me the closeness is driven by the daughter who has no other close relationships so she clings to him emotionally as her only rock.

My partner was widowed traumatically when his daughter, an only child, was 14. She is now 22. They are (understandably) very, very close, they still live together most of the time. She is supposed to be at uni but (as it is nearby) she comes home at least 3 to 4 nights every week without fail. I think that, as well as being traumatised by her mother’s premature death, she is autistic too and reclusive. She has only one friend, so is heavily reliant on my partner for any social interactions- he is her main relationship. For example, on her birthdays she likes to go out for dinner with just her Dad even though they are alone together the majority of the time anyway!

I can see they were traumatised by the sudden bereavement and became dependent on each other. When he is at mine, they text numerous times a day about everything from the news to domestic things such as food to buy, or putting the washing machine on.

Sometimes it does feel as if they are a domestic couple in all ways except physical intimacy. However, in my case, I feel that the emotional dependency is driven by her needs and mental health, not so much by him.

If I’m honest it quite suits me for now, as I still have a teenager at school and I’m wary of disrupting our lives by living with my partner. So we see each other at my house at weekends which is fine. As we grow older though, I don’t know what can happen…I don’t think I could cope with living with his daughter and her avoidance of the world on a daily basis.

Overall- mine is a nice guy and it’s not him who is obsessed with the daughter, he just accepts and, I think sometimes sort of feeds, her complete emotional dependency. So it’s a similar hurdle to another relationship.

I think you did the right thing to not tolerate the dynamic going into the future. Maybe I shouldn’t either!

Some posters are taking a polarised response almost implying the only two categories are incest or a healthy relationship. Maybe there’s a whole sliding scale in-between? There are all sorts of possibilities including enmeshment, codependency etc.

Exactly. Something can be non sexual but still psychologically very unhealthy. There are lots of types of relationships that arent sexual but still very dysfunctional.

Er, the daughter in question is a 35 year old woman.

I am very close to my dad, we do a lot of things together, including holidays and trips out.
I am alarmed that you think there is something wrong with being close to your family.

Yes I've experienced something like this. It was not as extreme, it came to a halt as I came on the scene when she was younger but I think it could have continue to this. He didn't share a bed with her but he did give her spouse status. I felt like I was her rival in her mind. It was strange because I expected the DC to worry I was replacing their mother but this I was not prepared for. It's horrible.

Are you finished with him?

I think that sounds like a normal close parent-child relationship. Would you think it was too much if he were her mum?

That’s exactly what I was thinking about the presents!

This is such an interesting thread. A number of years back I put up a thread about how my Mother-in-Law insisted on sharing a hotel bedroom with my husband (at his late 30s at the time) when they were away at a family event together that her husband could not attend. Me voicing my discomfort over this resulted in a significant row between me and my husband.

I stated I thought it was 'grim' that they were sharing an hotel room as adults in my OP and got my arse well and truly handed to me on a plate, told I was a horrible, controlling mad person, and had it insinuated I was the one with the disgusting mind for even thinking there could possibly be anything inappropriate about family members sharing an hotel room.

Admittedly, they were not sharing a bed, but this thread really does show that gender has an impact on people's thoughts on this.

The post where somebody talked about how there was a 'spousal status' given to the child rings horribly true, and it is very difficult for the OHs of people in these parentified relationships, but something we aren't really allowed to mention.

FWIW I am now v low contact with my MIL, as a result of other egregious behaviour. They are still enmeshed in a way that causes issues for our relationship.

I was thinking jewellery.

I am not close to my dad and have always wished to be! Lots of my friends have close relationships with theirs that sound v similar to what OP describes. I think it sounds lovely and exactly how it should be.

I wonder if there is an element of jealousy involved - OP wanting to be the only woman in his life.

There's a social taboo on bed sharing with the opposite sex after puberty so it wouldn't be as strange if it was with her mother. I think also that buying jewellery or even lingerie would be more normal for a mother to daughter than father to daughter.

Well, there's close and there's close!

This is exactly it. It helps nobody affected by these situations to place a criminal bar (incest) for somebody, particuarly a spouse(!), to be allowed to voice their discomfort over this behaviour.

Treating criminal behaviour, particuarly when it occurs within families, as an aberration rather than a sometimes natural progression of unhealthy dynamics and belief systems is a comforting thought, but not a realistic one I'm afraid.