Living with family can both a blessing and a curse. This is especially true for one woman who's been having a unique problem with her boyfriend's mother. The mom has been bunking with the couple after she lost her job and needed a place to stay, but things took a strange turn when the woman noticed that her special and expensive bras started to go missing. The culprit: her boyfriend's mom.
The woman explained that she and her boyfriend recently moved in with his mom and younger siblings after an unfortunate set of circumstances.
But she explained in her letter to the Dear Prudence advice column that when the couple made the decision to live with them, she never predicted that there'd be anything this level of strange.
"I have never gotten weird vibes from my boyfriend’s mom, just the general introvert vs. extrovert clashes," she wrote.
The Letter Writer (LW) has to buy special bras so her back doesn't hurt during her shifts at work.
Because most of the bras she buys are custom-made, "the cheapest ones start at $200," she wrote. "My underwear drawer is more expensive than my phone, tablet, and laptop."
Over the past few months, the LW has noticed that her pricey lingerie has started to disappear.
She would hand wash the bras, go to work, "and they would be gone when I came back."
"I honestly thought I was losing my mind or my boyfriend’s teenage brother was stealing them," she wrote.
The truth was so much weirder: "It turned out to be his mom."
The LW pieced things together after she noticed her own bra strap on her boyfriend's mom, so the LW confronted her.
"She took them because hers 'broke' and she couldn’t be bothered to go shopping," she wrote. "She didn’t think it was a 'big deal.' We are 'both girls,'" her boyfriend's mom explained.
That's not really how things work.
Few of us lend out our bras even with the people we're closest to. So the LW confronted her boyfriend and told him she wanted her bras back.
To the LW, "this was creepy, very, very creepy." She added, "I have a mother and sisters and had girl roommates, and while I would be happy to loan underwear to someone in dire straits, no sane person would just help themselves!
"I guess I was too loud because my boyfriend’s mother returned everything — unwashed — and has made uncomfortable remarks about my sensitivity," she wrote.
Now things are really awkward in the house, and her boyfriend just doesn't get how inappropriate his mom's behavior was.
And not just that, but it's sort of weird that his mom would help herself to something so intimate.
"I really want to put a lock on our door now, and my boyfriend says I am being irrational," she wrote. "I feel like I have to put a clear sign about my boundaries because his mom went into our bathroom and stole my bras! I know it isn’t sexual, but I am freaked out. Am I wrong?"
People in the comments agreed that this behavior was strange.
"You are not being overly sensitive," one commenter wrote. "You and your boyfriend need to talk because he should know his mother is ridamndiculous for borrowing underwear with out asking. I suggest you think long and hard about this situation because having to move in with his family is also ridamndiculous but stuff happens. I say discuss some boundary for all because it seems he wasn't raised with enough and that mother has even less. The tell is the mother got mad and returned your bras unwashed — the nerve."
"Not a woman, but, I would be horrified by my father-in-law wearing my underwear," another person commented. "Just about equally disturbing would be to know that he had been rummaging through my stuff. I'm just guessing, but the mother has been through every drawer in their room. If the mother won't respect clear personal boundaries, and the son won't enforce them, I don't see much promise in this relationship."
"If anyone 'borrowed' my bras without asking I would go through the roof," a third person agreed. "I can't imagine thinking that would be ok. Anyone borrowing a bra in general is a huge no in my book. The only time I would ever consider it is if somehow a friend who is the same size as me lost everything in a fire or something like that."
Columnist Danny M. Lavery agreed -- a boundary had been crossed.
Lavery agreed that it was "super weird — and unnecessary and creepy" that her boyfriend's mom borrowed the bras.
"Even if these weren't expensive, custom-made pieces designed specifically to help you with your back pain, it would still be totally inappropriate for your boyfriend's mother to take them without asking," he wrote.
Lavery suggested that the LW have a real heart-to-heart conversation with her boyfriend and lay down some rules for when relatives come to visit.
"You may find yourselves instinctively opposed on more issues than just this one, and it will help to learn sooner rather than later what compromises are possible," he explained. But Lavery added that the LW also needed to consider that her current living situation would not work for her in the long run.
"But your desire for boundaries here is completely normal. Please don't let your boyfriend convince you that you're being high-maintenance or overly sensitive just because he's afraid of acknowledging the fact that his mother is misbehaving."
