What would make a nice man from a normal, uncomplicated, middle class family choose to keep getting involved with women with so much baggage?

[BakersKitchen]

I’m talking about my DB - of course he now has baggage himself so finding someone with zero baggage is probably out of the equation!

He is recently in another relationship, following a divorce, with a woman who has complicated circumstances. The women all have children from previous relationships (this current one has two from two different fathers and has had another cohabiting partner since). The previous one was much older and her child was the product of an affair which led to the relationship breakdown.

He also has his own child with his ex wife, who also had her own child from a previous relationship and was also much older than him. He married her extremely quickly after not having known her very long at all. He is now repenting at leisure!

All the women are on low incomes, supported by UC, living in poor quality rented accommodation or social housing. DB owns his own home and I wonder if they see him as a meal ticket although the divorce has cleared him out and his LTV is now back down to about 12%.

I can’t understand it. Why doesn’t he want to meet someone without all this drama and baggage?

We are (outside of this) a very nice normal middle class family with married parents and zero drama. My other brother, cousins, and I have all married nice, professional, university educated partners with no prior children and I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated that he keeps introducing these women and their children into our family dynamic, and then out again.

I feel desperately sorry for all children involved and extremely concerned there’s going to be another pregnancy announcement soon!

What’s the psychology here? Is it wanting to feel needed? Low self esteem? The irony is he has always been so judgemental about these sorts of situations and here he is living it!

Nobody grows up thinking - when I’m older I want to have different children by different fathers and introduce several different step siblings and coparenting relationships into our lives. It’s too complicated.

Nobody gets married thinking they want to get divorced either but shit happens. Do you think those women should just remain single and celibate? Should your brother? Having children - and (shock horror!) parents to those children - doesn’t make someone damaged goods. Sometimes relationships don’t work out. Should they stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leave, build their own life and then have the audacity to inflict themselves onto your nice middle class family?

You never know what people or a family is truly like until you have lived with them . You would be suprised at what goes on behind closed doors. They are not going to tell you are they ? Your brother is a grown man and you can’t dictate to or live his life for him. If he doesn’t learn from his mistakes then there is not a lot you can do.

Is that you Hyacinth?

You can be rude all you like. Some people have been genuinely helpful. I don’t believe other people would me miraculously okay with their family member making such choices, you’re just using it as an excuse to pile on and distract from my actual question

And you were told these women give him a sense of acceptance that you and your mother/siblings don’t

he feels comfortable with these women and doesn’t feel at home with women like you or the sort you prefer him to meet ?

that’s ok - why the analysis?

You think being a lone parent to his kids is "contributing very little"? Because that's what she's done for years?

She was a lone parent before they met and only ever working very part time despite her child being in school. That’s a choice - when they married she brought nothing financially to the table and now she’s suddenly walked away with over half their assets. Assets they were only able to achieve because of the generosity of my parents. You bet I am furious.

You are pretending that all the time she spent cleaning his house, ironing his shirts, cooking his meals, shopping for his food, etc etc has no monetary value. It does. And because she did all that, he was able to stay late to make deadlines, study for professional exams, go to evening networking events, and relax when he got home instead of having to cook and clean and launder every night.

She added value. You refuse to see that because you have the misogynist attitude that women's unpaid labour in the home isn't really work.

Isn't this basically the analysis? He doesn't feel comfortabke around women like the OP, so he dates very different ones.

You'd think that my family were normal and upper working class prior to the divorce. We weren't. All the comments about "scapegoat" and the designated patient (that's the proper term for what a PP described as "ill or 'troubled'") have me nodding along like crazy. And I can see that pattern on my father's side going back to my grandparents' time: one kid who was the scapegoat and another who was the golden child.

But she was already doing that when they met. Not working I mean. It’s not like she gave up a career to facilitate their family. She brought nothing into the marriage - how can it be fair she gets to walk away with OVER half?

She was doing that work for him as well as herself from the moment they both said "I do".

That she was doing it already is irrelevant to that.

By your reasoning, none of us should ever chip in for petrol if we carshare to go to a festival, because the driver was going there anyway. And none of us should pay towards utilities if living as adults with our parents, because the lights were on anyway.

none of that’s justifies receiving more than half though does it?

The judge believed it does, and the judge will have been in possession of more facts than you and I have.

Maybe he was over insulated in his early years from some of the unpalatable realities of life, i.e.too sheltered an upbringing, over protective parenting. Perhaps a string moral compass had been installed in him but it sounds like he might simply lack real life experience.. that's what crosses my mind.