Help My Relationship

Everyone gave me really great advice last time around so I’m asking for the same. please review my last post for details. SO and I are looking to get engaged and married soon. He shares a mortgage with his father and currently his parents, sibling, and him all live in the house. He currently pays the mortgage for family (says it’s a value of his) although he claims his parents and/or sibling can afford it. He has said plan is when we get married, he won’t be paying that mortgage anymore but paying our mortgage/rent. I am not comfortable with financial entanglements with parents and am worried about us getting a mortgage of our own. When we spoke about this before, SO said he’d refinance eventually and get off the mortgage. I asked for this to be done before engagement. Last post, the majority consensus was for him to refinance the current mortgage too so he can get off it and we’d qualify for a mortgage. I also plan on being a SAHM. He tells me now that he plans to remain on the mortgage as the refinance rate is 2% higher and this equates to $250k over the life of the loan. He has a traditional family background so it is like “my family money will eventually be our money” and he thinks it’s a bad decision to ”waste” 250k and that he’s read things online that he should be able to get another mortgage with his salary. His salary is around 150k. Current house is in NJ, worth about 530k. House was just bought 4 years ago, likely 30 year mortgage. He thinks he’ll be able to get a second mortgage with this salary or that “we’ll definitely be able to the first year of our marriage when I’m not a SAHM.” My salary is about 100k. We plan to buy in NJ. Regardless of whether he can get a second mortgage or not (already a question mark), his financial entanglement with his family bothers me and I don’t want to be caught up with that after marriage and put myself in an even more vulnerable spot than just being a SAHM. I shared with him that we’d have to end the relationship if he chooses to remain on the mortgage. I’m feeling like the father doesn’t want to change anything about the mortgage and SO is trying to keep everyone happy. I don’t want to end the relationship..what’s the best move here or is there anything that can make this situation better?

I (39F) share a home with my son and my mom (70F). It's a small house. She is retired and I am on summer break from my teaching job. Needless to say, it's easy for tension to build. She has a history of ignoring my boundaries. We've had several discussions about boundaries. She says she has no boundaries I have to follow for her, therefore, mine don't really matter. I.E. I told her my bedroom is not another living space and she is not allowed to hang out in there, clean it, etc. She still does and moves my stuff around. She claims that since she wouldn't care if I did that in her room, that it's automatically okay for her to do it to my room. My other boundary is "no means no." If I say "no" I mean it and I don't need to explain myself. Instead, if I say "no" she just keeps asking as if I'm going to suddenly change my mind. It's like I'm arguing with a toddler. For instance, she walks the dog everyday. And everyday, she asks if I want to go with her. I don't, because every minute away from her helps me with my sanity as an introvert. Of course I don't say this. I just say "no." But it is met with "come on"...."just come"..."it's good for you"...and doesn't stop until I lose it and we start fighting. Obviously, since this has been happening to me for nearly 40 years, we end up arguing and hurting our relationship. She's back from the walk now. I told her again that my boundary is she needs to accept my answer and move on. She started crying and said she's leaving the house and is going somewhere "where she is appreciated." So now it's my fault and I guess I don't appreciate her. How do I make things better?

You cannot control other people, which is part of the reason why boundaries are how WE react to protect ourselves. They are not rules and obligations we can impose on other people no matter how reasonable they are or how much they are to protect us. You communicated your boundaries to your mother, which is great and would be the end of things if she cared. But she doesn't, so now the hard part of boundaries actually comes in: enforcing your own well-being with your own actions.

So, if your mother won't stop going in your room, then you need to figure out if that boundary is important enough for you to protect or loose enough that you're willing to let it drop. I personally would not like this either, so I would install an external lock on my bedroom door and keep the key on my person or locked up somewhere my mother couldn't get to.

You can't get your mother to stop trying to badger you into going for a walk, but you can tell her "no" once, and then stop responding. And if ignoring her doesn't work or it's really annoying to listen to, you can put on noise cancelling headphones, turn an audiobook on to drown her out, or hole up in your room for a bit until she leaves.

The bigger option to deal with all of this is to evict your mother.

As for making things better, that's not really up to you. You are both involved in your relationship, so both of you need to work together to improve things. You can give your 50%, but you can't make her meet you halfway, which is necessary for healthy relationships. You can try enforcing your boundaries without arguing with her about it and giving it some time to see if she adjusts (and she may or she may not, it all depends). You can let her have her little manipulation fit and see that you're not going to bend, and she needs to adjust or lose her relationship with you. You can let her move out and hope that more space improves things between you two. You can decide she's more important and let her define your comfort zones for you. You can suggest family counseling and see if she's open to listening or changing. But someone is going to be upset for a while (or potentially the entire duration of your relationship), whether that's you, her, or both of you. It's going to be up to you to balance what you're okay with and for how long.

I feel like I’m not good enough for a relationship. I am selfish. I don’t think about others, unless it’s friends and family. I am too consumed with my own life (work, cleaning house, I’m a single mom who’s child’s father is deceased, so I’m by myself 24/7) to be aware of my surroundings. I don’t do good under stress. I always think they’re going to leave me for someone else or they don’t actually care and want me for sex. I am 28 years old and I have never had a healthy relationship, and I have ruined a relationship that could’ve been a healthy one. I fucked it up. I don’t blame him for leaving, I was doing too much. But how many more times will this happen? I don’t even know where to begin on the things I need to fix, I am filled with unhealed trauma from my previous toxic relationships, I fucked myself financially and I’m working on fixing that, I have my child to take care of. I’ve always wanted a partner. A companion. Sounds amazing on paper, all the things we could’ve done together had I… had I not been me. I love him. That I know of he loved me, he told me and showed me… somehow, I still felt that he had someone he’s hiding from me (happened to me before, twice) or that he just doesn’t care about my interests or the stuff I talk about. He did express to me topics he didn’t like, I would avoid those topics but I’m talking shows I like or something I saw on YouTube earlier that day. If it was something he genuinely wasn’t interested in or he had heard about it already, he would try and change the subject, which got on my nerves and snapped at him for it because yes, you knew about it and I didn’t, so I want to talk about it with him… I’m getting off track. And he has this rule to not make him repeat himself. He means this when I don’t listen to him, when I talk about a topic he said he doesn’t like, or when I ask questions that asked already but didn’t remember asking him, or when I snap at him for “hiding someone” or because I feel he doesn’t care. I’ve never… dealt with something like this, my exes would just either yell at me because they never did/say what I accused them, or if I forgot something, or they just gave me the silent treatment. I never… had someone flat out tell me this boundary and he’s right, I didn’t listen or care because I have my life going on. For a year and a half, we never lived together, we talked on the phone the majority of the time and went out on a few dates, we would occasionally go to each other’s places. In person, it was always great, we helped each other around the house and he interacted with my 6 year old fairly well, it’s mainly over the phone when we had issues. He didn’t want to move in because he lives with his mom and helps her with bills and he also feels like he’s obligated to help his 3 sisters out with their kids. Oldest sister has 2 kids and a fiance, she doesn’t really need him to watch them. Middle sister left her 3 year old 10 years ago and they haven’t heard from her since (she is not missing, they know where she’s at. She just blocked all connection to them.), the child is 13 now and him and his mom basically raised her. Youngest sister has 5 kids, youngest is a year and a few months. He has to watch them every single day and doesn’t want to bring that burden onto me. He did tell me he would drop everything if we resolved our issues and created a healthy system. As you can see, never happened. I don’t even know where to begin to fix my issues, I also can’t afford therapy. I came here for help. Where do I even begin?

Are you assuming you can't afford therapy or do you know you can't afford therapy because you've exhausted all free, sliding scale, and low cost therapy options near you? Because there's a lot of options out there to access therapy regardless of your financial situation.

I’ve been in a 3 year long relationship and my girlfriend has a lot of mental illness, she has anxiety,depression, ADHD, panic disorder just to name some. I don’t know how to break up because I am no longer happy in this relationship and just want to be left alone. I never get to hangout with friends anymore or even have dinner with my family bc she ALWAYS wants to be with me and hates eating anything but fast food. Anyways I just don’t know what to do because she has a few panic attacks every day and when she does I just want to leave and get out and break up with her so bad because of how she acts and treats me during them but I know that would be a asshole move to leave during something like that. But when everything is fine I second guess myself and tell myself nothing is going wrong in the moment so I can’t just out of nowhere breakup with her. I feel like we’ve been together to long to do it over text but idk I’m just so over it she’s with me every day all day 24/7 365 and I just can’t anymore. Any advice on how/what I should do??

2 months ago my bf, now my ex, broke up with me. We were dating for 2 years but “seeing each other” for almost 5 years. At the start of the relationship he emotionally cheated on me by texting his ex behind my back for months. When I found out, it crushed me. But I loved him so much I took him back, hoping that he’d change. It wasn’t just a one-time thing, it kept going and we constantly fought about it. And one day, it just stopped. She got a bf and removed him. But it finally stopped. I didn’t have enough self respect back then to walk away. I was in love with him in the end. The last 2 years I really struggled with the emotional cheating and the trust was never quite the same. He did finally treat me right, but it didn’t matter anymore. In the last few months, I guess resentment build up as I never truly healed from the pain he caused me. After all, we stayed together and every time we’d see each other it’d have such a good time. But I guess in some way I was living through the relationship and constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting for him to hurt me again. Then as time went on, my interest to hang out with him grew smaller and smaller and we’d spend 2-3 weeks without seeing each other, despite living close by. Then 2 months ago, he broke up with me. It did hurt me as it opened old wounds of him not truly loving me. I guess how I see it is if you truly love someone, you fight for the relationship and try to make it work. That’s what I did for him. But when the doubts grew in his mind with the distance between us, he saw it as a sign that I’m not the girl of his dreams since he feels like he should’ve missed me more. But he didn’t. And therefore he doesn’t want to try fix the relationship. He thinks that the person he spends his life with, he should feel like he can’t spend time apart and crave to see them. We didn’t have that anymore. So it hurts that I destroyed myself trying to forgive him after he emotionally cheated. Just for him to walk away in the end. It makes me feel like he never truly loved me. Or at least, not in the way I loved him. Anyone else ever experience this? How did you move on from it?

Last night my boyfriend wanted to come over to my house to pick up a bottle of tequila that I had. He asked if i wanted to spend the night at his place, but i was comfortable at home so I passed. I’m in his car to give him the bottle and he suddenly drives away(1), skips red lights(2), and says he’s “kidnapping me”(3) because he wants me to come over. I started to get upset because I jumped in his car with pajamas thinking I would go back inside. I left the door unlocked, and didn’t take my keys with me. I kept telling him to please pull over and take me home, but he just kept driving(4). Eventually he pulls over, but it was because he started to get upset at me(5). He starts calling me annoying(6), starts to say “You’re an annoying ass bitch”(7) he kept saying “Why do I have to force my girlfriend to come over”(8), “I shouldnt have to beg you to come over”(9) “We haven’t even seen each other that often” (Me and my boyfriend see each other very frequently, he came over on Saturday and spent the night)(10) Then he proceeds to break up with me(11), he starts driving me home but he’s driving very very fast(12) to the point where I get scared and then he told me he wants to slap me(13). When he gets in front of my house he physically tries to push me out of the car(14). He’s gotten really mad at me and threatened to break up(15), but it’s never been like this. I haven’t tried to contact him, I don’t know how to proceed.

My boyfriend (M19) and I (F18) have been together for about 2 years. He’s my first love and first serious relationship, so this situation is affecting me more than I expected. He recently got a visa and is moving to Germany in about a month to work at McDonald’s. What makes this difficult is that for a long time he would tell me things like “I’m not leaving without you” and “I’m staying because of you.” Now he’s leaving, and I feel blindsided. He says he’s doing it for our future and that if I really love him, we’ll get through long distance. I understand that perspective, but part of me feels hurt because if the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t be okay with that. Another issue is his mom’s influence. It feels like a lot of his major life decisions involve her. The move to Germany was something she pushed for heavily it feels like she’s pushing him to go live in Germany with her, she even made him go there to work at Mc Donalds with them. He also talks about me moving to Germany after I finish school and living with his parents in the same house. That honestly scares me because I keep wondering whether, in the future, we’ll make decisions as a couple or whether his mom will always have a bigger say. There’s also a situation with his sister that has bothered me throughout the relationship. He talks about her constantly, compares things to her, and she comes up in conversations far more than what I personally consider normal. What’s even stranger to me is that I’ve never met her despite us being together for two years. She blocked me after I posted a story with her brother (my boyfriend), and she sends him snaps wearing his shirts. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve questioned whether there are healthy boundaries there. Combined with how much influence his family has on his decisions, it makes me worry about what a future together would look like. The other thing is that my dream was always to move to the US someday. If I stay with him, the expectation seems to be that I’ll move to Germany instead because that’s where he wants to build his future. Sometimes I feel like I’m being asked to give up my own plans while also accepting a long-distance relationship.