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female
,
anonymous
writes: I love my boyfriend, but I can't stand his family. Every time he is around them, which is a lot since they live in the same town and they babysit his son, they fight a lot and yell and disrespect each other. It's awkward and uncomfortable, and then my boyfriend is in a bad mood and not fun to be around. And I don't think they like me because of religious and political differences. They are very conservative and I'm not. I also don't like to be around my boyfriend's son, who he has half custody of, because he's loud and messy and misbehaved. My boyfriend insists on staying close to his family even though they fight so much. We love each other a lot. We have a lot of fun together, we have a lot to talk about, we laugh a lot, overall it's a good relationship and we've been together for three years. But I feel like if I marry him, I'll be marrying his family also, and I don't think I can deal with that. They really ruin my happiness, and my boyfriend's too, but he won't even think of moving away. He says I'm just being spoiled, and that life isn't perfect and you just deal. Should I try to accept this, because life is not perfect, or should I move on? I'm 28 and don't have a lot of time to waste.
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female
reader, Bev Conolly  +, writes (15 July 2005):
 Being 28 and hearing your ovaries ageing is NOT - repeat, not - a good reason for considering marriage to someone.
Presumably, if you get married and have a child with your boyfriend, you'd like for that child to have a Dad around, right? Well that won't happen if you rush into marrying someone whose family you hate, who's son you don't appear to care about and who himself calls you names like "spoiled" and doesn't seem to give a rat's about your opinions.
Your boyfriend has already demonstrated that his family come first, by not creating healthy boundaries between himself and their fighting. Yes, you *will* be marrying his family if you marry him. You'll also become the stepmother of his child and will be seeing that child A LOT in the next 20-30 years. You'll also be binding yourself to a man who's not strong enough to make a distinction between the source of his unhappiness (his family) and the woman he's supposed to love (you). You can look forward to many, many more of his bad moods.
How can I make this clearer to you? Things aren't going to change with him and his offspring and his family. You can either, as he suggests, "learn to deal with it" and accept them all as they are, or you can walk away and find a healthy, mature man who can form adult relationships.
I do hope you make a decision that makes you happy.
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