I’m a 30-year-old woman who has been with my partner for almost four years. We’re very happy and we want to spend the future together.
The most significant problem in our relationship is his mother’s treatment of him and her behaviour affects both of us. She is cruel towards him.
She criticises my partner over innocuous things: telling him to stop talking, saying cruel things about his appearance, calling him useless.
She then acts as though he’s overreacting if he tries to stand up for himself. She tries to embroil me in her behaviour but I’m firm in telling her I’m not going along with it.
She leaves us feeling completely exhausted, and my partner sinks into a depression for at least a week. But he is also defensive of her. He claims her behaviour is because of grief over the loss of her husband a few years ago, but my mum also lost my dad and she hasn’t become cruel to other people.
My partner spent many of his teen years and 20s in addiction but he’s been clean for almost a decade. I see the connection between her treatment of him and his past problems, but he can’t.
I’m anxious about my future with my partner because I worry about how she would treat our children if we have them, and how negative her impact on them would be. My most irrational anxiety is that I would have a child who reminded me of her physically or in character, and that I would come to loathe the child because of it.
I went to psychotherapist Julia Bueno, who said something that really stuck in my mind: “In my experience, a depression that comes in the wake of contact with someone is a symptom of a relationship that causes shame, ie a sense of worthlessness which makes sense given everything you’ve said. Your partner’s former addiction also suggests this.”
Although I can understand why you would feel as you do, I don’t think your mother-in-law should have any bearing on whether you have children since you will be at the helm, not her. However, you may decide that your partner is not the right person to have children with, and that’s a different story.
Lots of terrible parents make fabulous grandparents, although I would not take the risk with your mother-in-law, as she sounds awful and I would absolutely minimise her contact with any children you do have, unless she changes radically.
“You are clearly a compassionate person,” said Bueno. “But the truth of the matter is that this woman is very unpleasant and emotionally destructive. She might even be described as abusive and that needs to be named, regardless of your partner’s defensiveness.”
Bueno felt it was very important that your partner recognises his mother’s behaviour is not OK. “It doesn’t mean saying it to her or challenging her to a reckoning – it’s an internal acceptance first. ”
“The next step,” suggests Bueno, “is your partner forging effective boundaries between him and his mother, external ones – seeing her less or for shorter periods of time – and the deeper work of internal ones, such as building up a stronger sense of where he ends and she begins. This may need therapy. When his boundaries are firmer you will be in a better position to move on and decide if you want a child or not.”
The pluses in this are that your partner has been clean for 10 years and recognises that he wouldn’t tolerate his mum treating anyone else as she does him. But now he needs to apply that to himself. If he can’t or won’t, think very carefully about your future with this man, because he will always come with his mum attached.
Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.
