pls talk to me if you had a close family ruptured by a son or brother's partner

[futurepredictor]

This is more about the man than the partner but titled it this way for shorthand.
I'm a sibling in this situation but imagine many parents have experience similar with sons - looking for advice.

We used to be a very tightknit loving family. My brother was with and then married a woman who we didn't think was right for him and we worried about him a great deal. For many years it was an acceptable polite relationship but over time he became more and more resentful and sullen with the rest of the family. With hindsight, I wonder if in his naiveity he actually told her what we thought which sullied it from the off - so she didn't want to see us and had her guard up? I have no basis to think this just idle wondering.

A few years ago our mother died and this seems to have brought out another side to him.The resentment and dwelling on past 'perceived' issues has just got greater and greater from him. The situation has deteriorated and he is barely speaking to any of us. It's sort of become a Harry & Meghan/ Brooklyn Beckham & Nicola Peltz situation where he now speaks badly of all of us all the time and blames it all on bad treatment of his wife (which is just not true).

Me and my sister both miss our close relationship with our brother which went years ago. My dad is devastated but is of that stiff upper lip 'let him get on with' generation. I think when he dies it will be the end of contact with our brother.

So my question is, has anyone got any positive stories about a happy ending in this situation? is it recoverable? or advice about what to do? do I have to resign myself to the sadness of that relationship having died. Why do men do this? I read lots of stories of this sort on here but it is almost never about a daughter/sister rupture due to their partner.

How would you feel towards a family member who made it clear they didn’t like the person you had chosen to spend your life with?

You treated his wife like shit because you never liked her and blame her for you pushing your own brother away.

You need to accept your part in this, and apologise sincerely if you want any hope of mending things.

This one is on you and your family. You sound awful and it is particularly interesting that you don’t think your brother should have any emotions on you sharing what you thought of his partner. Also emotionally immature, awful behaviour.

My exH family didn't like me. It was shit.

I’ve missed where the OP said they treated her like shit? What did they do?

They told there brother she wasn’t good enough for him and they very obviously don’t like her
so of course that would if straight back to her

Was your db the eldest in the family? In my family it was the eldest sister who drifted away from us. Sometimes the shift from parent of teen to parent of young adult can be a very steep learning curve. There comes a point where it just isn’t okay to express negativity about a person’s partner, and my parents overshot that with her.

He was awful, and absolutely leveraged the situation to isolate her, and the rift lasted for years. Another person might have made more of an effort - both dh and I cut each others families a lot of slack and can trust each other to uphold reasonable boundaries. My parents weren’t wrong to distrust and dislike him. But nonetheless they handled it badly.

Have you ever apologised to your db, for whatever part you played? That was how I rebuilt my relationship with her. It took me time to get to a point where I could get past my feelings about him, and my feelings about her subsequent actions and their effect on our family, because there was a lot wrong in that. But I had to start with her, and her feelings, and take responsibility for my part in her hurt (without diminishing the sincerity of the apology with my thoughts about the rest of it). Once I could focus on her point of view, and see how hurtful it had been, how abandoned and betrayed she felt, I wanted to heal that. It took time.

You reap what you sow.

Yep, you treated them like shit and now you want to click your fingers and have it all back how it was before you ruined it

You made it very plain as a family you didn’t like her.
But understandably your brothers loyalties are to his wife..
my fear too is that my DS might marry someone I don’t warm to. But I recognise if that happens it’s his choice and I’ll keep my views and any reservations to myself. And be positive.

Why ‘of course’? How would it be beneficial to anyone for her brother to tell her that his family didn’t like her?

Has it been beneficial that they shared with their brother all their opinions of his wife?

Have you apologised for whatever you said about his wife? That would probably be a start.

@futurepredictor (if you come back..) why didn’t you think and tell him she wasn’t good enough for your
family?

I’m going to swim upstream from the general opinion on this one, because something very similar happened in my family. One of my siblings became involved with someone that wasn’t right for them either. They eventually recognised this themselves and tried to leave several times, always involving us to give them the courage and encouragement. They never did leave, and catastrophically told their partner what had been discussed. The partner then isolated my sibling from the family over the years, picking us off one by one, with the narrative of “us against them”. My sibling is still with them and now estranged from all of us, with the story we don’t like their partner.
It’s a massive stab in the back from a Catch 22 situation. Our sibling asked for support to leave their abusive partner so we had the best intentions, but now we are the villains. 🤷‍♀️
if your situation is similar then I sympathise.

Not subjecting themselves to his interfering and unpleasant siblings is beneficial to the brother and his wife. I would absolutely expect my husband to tell me if his sister acted as OP has.

It doesn’t suit OP and her sister, but oh well.

Do you have concerns that your brother’s wife is abusive in some way? If not, why have you taken so strongly against her?

I have experience of this, but from the other perspective.

A member of DH’s family didn’t like me, didn’t think I was right for him and wasn’t particularly subtle about it. I was a teenager when we got together and I guess he tried to hide it for a while but it wasn’t long into our adult life he gave up. His reasons were questionable at best, I am too southern, too ‘posh’ and too smiley. Yes apparently you can smile too much. Well my husband didn’t accept that and (without any prompting from me) completely distanced himself from this family member.

He moved in with me, went to university in my city and we ended up losing contact for a long while. It was only when we were visiting years later and he apologised to DH and I (at the request of his other family who I was always very close to) they started to build a relationship again. Since then, while I may not be his favourite person, he has put in a real effort to repair our relationship too and we get on fine.

My advice is get to know her, apologise if she was made to feel uncomfortable and try and be open minded. If you value the relationship with your brother then try and understand what he sees in her. Reflect on why you thought she wasn’t right for him, was it just your own biases and preconceptions or something she did? Talk to him, admit it wasn’t handled well and that the family shouldn’t have put him in that position. Basically build bridges. You might not be best friends at the end of the day but it’s the best way to rebuild family bonds in my experience.