Even the best marriages face challenges. Sometimes it’s infidelity. Sometimes your finances just don’t add up. But for many people, the bear to face is your significant other’s parents — especially if you don’t get along with your mother-in-law. Just ask one woman, who told Reddit that her longtime hatred of her MIL is starting to come to a boil.
The Original Poster really meant business. “Got married last month and already thinking about divorce because of my MIL,” she wrote in her post’s title.
Her husband is a “very sweet guy” and is “extremely loving” — but his mom is not.
“He has a b—- of a mother,” she wrote in a forum on Reddit for people with horrible mothers-in-law.
“To him she’s like an angel sent from heaven with a big heart and to me she’s a narcissistic b—- who’s grade one emotional manipulator and a woman who never takes accountability for her mistakes, she’s belittled me time and again and has now started showing her dislike towards my family,” she added.
It doesn’t help that on the surface his mom is “sweet and very nice to everyone.”
Because when it’s just the two of them, the OP finds her to be “selfish and mean towards me and my family, like not directly but she’ll say things indirectly and sometimes even as a joke which ends up leaving me hurt,” she wrote.
The OP’s husband told her that she shouldn’t “bottle up” her feelings, but when she does tell him how she feels about his mom ,“he just can’t handle it.”
The OP wrote that after these talks she's always made to feel like she’s an “idiot” for feeling the way she does, and the two have been fighting more and more over his mom.
“I feel ganged up and alone sometimes,” she wrote.
“Sometimes when she says something hurtful I give it back to her and because of which I’m looking like an asshole,” she added.
The conversation then becomes about how the OP is “rude.”
Or how she won’t stop complaining about her MIL to her husband — “it becomes about me being a negative person and what not."
“And there’s always this sentence that gets to be ‘she’s old, she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she didn’t mean it the way you’re taking it,’” the OP wrote. “She’s 56 …”
Now the OP is stumped. Her husband seems so hurt when she tells him what a “d—” his mom is.
“I mean I get no one likes to hear negative things about their parents but come on man open your eyes and see!!!!” she wrote.
Some people chimed in with advice.
"If you have to, use the line. 'Explain that to me … am I understanding this correctly?' when she secretly snipes at you," one commenter advised. "Make her outright say it … and record it so when hubs declares she did not mean it like that … you can play back to prove she most certainly did."
"Therapy is your hail mary pass," another person added. "It's the only option that I've seen work. But be prepared for it not to fix, too. Better to get out early than waste years on a man that can't be a partner because they're too busy being a son."
Another person put it this way: "His mom. His problem. Your solution should always include the door. Let him handle this and if he does well, great. If not, that door leads to at least one man who will respect you enough."
For now, the OP has decided to go low contact.
"So I live like 7 mins away from where my in laws live," she wrote later in the thread. "I don’t go over to their place that often."
Before her wedding, the OP used to call her MIL "quite a bit" because "at that time she seemed like a chill person and a friend," but after their wedding "I got to see her true self," she wrote.
"I’ve already stopped calling her, only talk when she calls and that’s it," she added.
And if all else fails, the OP will pretend she's too busy with work to visit.
"Like today only my mother in law said 'when will I get to spend time with you' and I said 'I have too much work,'" she wrote.
Keeping away from her MIL is definitely one way to handle the problem, but at some point the OP should get her husband into a counseling session. He needs to be her teammate, not her opponent.
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