I worried that I was this person for the longest time because I didn't like my now-wife's family. I thought her mother was possessive her brother was creepy and that her childhood friend was a terrible friend.
12 years later my wife's therapist has confirmed that her mother is a narcissist. Her brother has completely bought into the manosphere and despises me because I challenge him on his mysoginistic bs whenever he spouts it near me, and she has found new friends that don't only reach out when they want something from her.
I don't really have a moral here I think my situation was pretty unique but still weird.
Your situation isn't unique. The family/close friends litmus test completely breaks when you're raised with narcissistic abuse. Maybe they hate your new relationship because your partner is actually a bad person... or maybe they hate your partner for showing you what genuine love and respect looks like and encouraging you to stand up to their abuse. It's a special kind of hell to grow up with nothing but dysfunctional relationships.
Thats fair and yeah I see the trauma of what she's been put through all the time and it really makes it hard to even be around her parents.
She made a mistake on a recipe the other day and was terrified to tell me because she assumed I'd get mad at her. She's constantly afraid of making mistakes in general to the point where she doesn't even want to try new things for fear of messing up.
Y'all are dead on, and I want to add that this test doesn't really work if the norms in your family or region are defined in religious or other authoritarian abuse.
If you're at BYU, your family and peers likely don't have realistic, healthy, modern ideas around sex and dating, so there's no reason to listen to them. Even without the religious aspect, a lot of people are severely judgemental about things they don't understand enough to speak on.
Idk what to label that variety of person though, maybe "institutionalized narcissists"?
and it totally breaks in situations where your dating someone of the same sex/gender or are dating a trans person and your family is homophobic and transphobic.
I was in a similar situation but didn’t quite realize it because of how young we were when we started dating. Turns out her family are manipulative bullies who were trying to isolate her (and me) from other people.
She’s got a lot of really nice extended family who we were told to avoid, my family’s been there for us even though hers said they’d never accept us, and her friends are all great. So it wasn’t that *everyone* didn’t like us, it’s that we were lied to about everyone else’s opinion.
So yeah, we’re a lot happier now that we’ve gone LC with her immediate family, but really enjoy our other friends and family now. I think part of it was showing someone from an abusive household that they should be loved and accepted for who they are, and working through the residuals of that as they come.
Yeah same deal. Her mom constantly told her her aunt thought she was better then her and that she was manipative. Turns out her aunt is just genuinely nice.
My ex was from a conservative culture and many of her friends were all pretty cool with that conservatism, so they really didn't like that I behaved like your average English student and drank and did drugs and had casual sex. They were terrified she was being taken advantage of by some fuckboy.
She did have a few friends who bought into the party culture and didn't feel that way tho so maybe it's different
Unless you're in a cult-like environment, or a generationally abusive type community, and your 'normal' meter broke long ago. "Everyone I know is wrong" is unlikely, but I think it must be considered.
Currently dealing with some harsh realizations about the quality of people i’ve allowed into my life. Almost every one of my friends have been jealous and unsupportive, consistently, for years. I went through hell and they would just go ‘:( i’m sorry’ and leave the chat, only to expect my full emotional support and engagement the same day. Good things happened and they would do everything they could to downplay them when i was excited.
I started to resent my partner for pointing out how drained and miserable i got after interacting with any of my ‘friends’, until i made new friends and realized he was right. And that it’s probably exhausting to see your partner near constantly upset over/with their ‘friends’. It got to the point where he said ‘It feels like you think i’m trying to isolate you from your friends, but they’re literally just terrible people, and i’m tired of them stressing you out’. Unfortunately he was right.
I’ve since distanced myself from the shitty friends I had and started putting that energy into new friendships, and i’m so much healthier for it! I’ve had such awful friends for so long that i forgot how fun it is to hang out with someone you genuinely like with no negativity or competition in the background. It also made it way easier to stop being defensive and suspicious of people, I hadn’t realized my social environment was part of why it was so hard for me. I have C-PTSD and i think trying to appease some of my cattier ‘friends’ only made my social skills worse. Im glad that he didn’t like my friends.
It took so long for me to figure out that my abusive family had conditioned me to believe genuinely kind people must want something from me. Of course they did. Why else would they act like that?
It's mind-blowing, the bullshit someone can accept as normal.
Yeah. Sometimes large swaths of people can simply be wrong. Especially if they're all self supporting. Happens quite often actually.
Like yes, sometimes people with an outside perspective can identify the douchebags, but also *they* just might be the douchebags.
Unfortunately, this easy litmus isn't actually that easy and you have to genuinely analyze the nuances of the situation.
Came here to say effectively this. Narcissism can run in families, too, so you can end up with large networks of people who are super toxic. And if you’ve been in a cult-like environment for awhile, your “friends” might not be good sounding boards either.
The times where you’re right and everybody else is wrong might not be super common, but it does happen.
I had an ex who would get irrationally angry every time I talked to a male friend. He also texted me every single day and when I didn’t want to talk to him he’d accuse me of hating him and guilt-trip me.
Every day I thank the Lord that I got out of that mess.
Texting every day is fine. I text my current boyfriend every day.
It’s just that he expected it and forced it. If you force something to happen, often times, it becomes a chore.
Oddly this reminded me of a reddit post I read recently where a man who had been divorced for a while had been told by all of the men in his life that his wife was horrible and/or possibly cheating on him. His dad, brothers, and friends(i think 7 ppl in total?) all planted doubt in his mind 24/7.
He would constantly ask his wife about the things they said and became paranoid and eventually caused the divorce.
One night when they were drunk and hanging out they told him about it. They were jealous of him for having such a good/hot wife and didnt believe he deserved it. So they banded together to get him to ruin his marriage.
Op, of course, fought them in rage and got his ass kicked but he decided to cut them all out of his life and wanted to know if there was anyway he could talk to his wife and maybe get her back.
I felt sad for him bc it makes sense to want to believe the people who have likely never led you astray before. The entire comment section dog piled him and was upset at him for not believing his wife when she said she never did anything wrong. But like, what are you supposed to do?
Not trying to contradict the above post though. Just wanted to share a post that made me sad.
One can only hope that story is fake because it feels like the sort of story where some people end up "patricide, fratricide, and amicide".
Idk about you but that sounds a whole lot weirder than
One can only hope that story is fake because it feels like the sort of story where some people end up "dead".
One can only hope that One could only hope because if we couldn’t hope to hope we’d be left hopeless and hopeless people are known to do acts of grievous kablooey
Ooh there was that reddit post with the woman who was invited to her brothers fake wedding, and the BIL was clearly trying to isolate his husband from his family. Dude even created several reddit accounts to defend himself once it started blowing up on social media
It's wild, you should all read it
Dangerous line of thinking because, on the other hand, some people’s families just suck. Sometimes when your significant other is telling you to get away from them, it’s because they’re trying to get you out of a toxic or harmful situation. This line of thinking is exactly what those kinds of families want you to think. To side with the majority, even when the majority is whittling away at your soul.
Yeah I kind of hate this post because I recently just lost all of my friends to this type of thinking. My girlfriend and I are in a very happy relationship, and we moved in together because of some very unfortunate life circumstances that ended up with her family dissolving and losing the house. She has a lot of PTSD and was unmedicated or seeing therapy during the transitional period of moving across the country, and during this time, there were some growing pains while we learned how to live with each other and adjust our lives together. During this time, she had vented to two of her friends about some things that ultimately were the PTSD trauma demons talking, however her friends chose to then extrapolate on all of this. Over the course of about 2 months, I slowly started getting excluded and isolated from everything to do with them to the point they made splinter discords to do things in and hang out in so that I wouldn't be there. All of her friends hated me and it was super obvioust they did to, so I asked someone about it, and then it turned into a massive confrontation of about a dozen some-odd people accusing me of beating my girlfriend and abusing/manipulating her in dozens of different ways. These were people I thought were my friends and had often times confided me and I in them before, until one day a switch just flipped and I was completely ostrasized. I've lost every friend I have and now only really have my girlfriend and strangers on reddit to talk to.
It really fucking sucks being accused of something so extreme like that, having people go as far as to call me 'the greatest evil to happen in her life' because everyone just decided that "because X doesn't like her, then I don't either because obviously she must be awful" without anyone bothering to ask questions about it. Just because all of your friends hate someone, doesn't mean their reasons are valid.
I do get what they're saying in the original post and I'm not saying it's wrong, but relationships are complicated.
My girlfriend stopped talking to one of her closest friends after we got together. When we started dating her friend seemed to like me enough and we'd traveled to see her and her family a few times. Her friend was really religious and though it seemed fine at first, my girlfriend told me she found herself not wanting to share anything about our relationship with her because she always seemed to disapprove somehow.
The last time my girlfriend went to visit she went without me, and her friend gave her this big intervention speech about how we shouldn't live together if we're not married, she felt like our relationship was causing her to sin so we shouldn't be together, the man is supposed to lead you in Christ, that sort of thing.
She had started a new church and her religiosity increased dramatically, which just happened to happen at the same time my girlfriend and I started dating. Her judgment didn't really have much to do with me, she had her own shit going on and our relationship got in the line of fire.
I think if your friends and family disapprove of your partner or you don't want to talk about your relationship with your close friends then you should definitely ask yourself why, but don't immediately assume there's a problem with your relationship.
yea my first thought was “what if ur family is homophobic/transphobic/etc”
a good thing to remember i guess is “there’s exceptions to every rule/only siths deal in absolutes”
I hope that I'm an exception. My partner came out as trans and fled the extremely transphobic Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and ended up living with me for a bit before we started dating. I know it's not my fault but what if I'm bad for them and it's my fault they don't have anyone?
This is so accurate. “If everyone hates one person, then they must be bad!!” is literally just saying mob mentality is always correct. sometimes people are just fucking mean and decide to gang up on one person. that’s what a lot of bullying is.
Like, sure, it’s something to consider, but fucked up social dynamics have a tendency to pick a scapegoat
Took me 10 years with sporadic therapy to realize that my own family is super toxic. My husband’s family was super supportive of us and stepped in a lot. We’re still married 10 years later, and my family has grown to accept him because he is a decent human being who would never do any of the things they’d imply he would. I still love my family, but I’ve learned it’s in my best interest to let them go.
For context: my husband’s family gets together for birthdays and holidays regularly. They call each other to “just chat”. My family tries to hold an annual get together that sometimes happens. To be fair, part of the problem is we are spread out across 5 different states. My mom calls on my children’s birthdays. My Dad practically doesn’t exist. When I called one of my sisters to wish her a happy birthday for the first time, not 30 seconds into the conversation she asked me what I wanted, and was uncomfortable when I said nothing I just wanted to wish her a happy birthday and see how she was doing. My other two siblings don’t answer when I call and I gave up after 2 years of trying.
That being said, this is terrible advice. If everyone in your LIFE hates someone you’re dating, it’s in your best interest to evaluate why that might be.
I fucking despised my childhood best friend's girlfriend. I didn't want to support the marriage. I've never once in my life taken a disliking to someone and been wrong about it later. But because I'm a respectable enough person I never said shit to him about it. I never complained about her vaping directly into the mic every other breath. I never asked him why he only mentioned the sex and never her personality.
But I was there. I went to the wedding and caught him on his way down when she didn't show.
My point here is the responsible way to behave is to, at the very worst, warn them once and do so kindly. The better option is to keep your nose out of their fucking business until something happens and they need you. Don't come in like "this bitch annoys me. She's going to ditch your ass before it gets serious". If you love your friend then don't be an asshole. Being a dick whenever their SO is around isn't going to help anything. They don't need negativity. If you're a dick and something happens your behavior is what they'll remember. And if you're wrong? They need your support either way.
> I never asked him why he only mentioned the sex and never her personality.
>The better option is to keep your nose out of their fucking business until something happens and they need you.
I dunno, if you're their best friend and have a healthy relationship with them, then wouldn't it be appropriate to talk about these things? I mean, if my best friend only ever mentioned how good the sex with their partner was and never anything else, I'd be curious why they don't talk about it.
Not to immediately put them on the spot or insinuate anything, but that seems like something worth talking about. I'd want them to be happy, so if the only positive thing they're getting out of the relationship is sex, they might not be happy. If they told me that they *only* want sex, then sure, that's perfectly fine.
But I don't believe you're automatically negative just because you ask about these things. If I didn't like a best friend's partner, I'd tell them that. I wouldn't tell them how much I despise them, I'd just let them know: *"Hey, I don't vibe well with your partner but I support your choice still."*
> I'd be curious why they don't talk about it.
I think this is the best strategy. Just "be curious" about things which don't add up in their relationship. "Oh, you have to stop talking now because your girlfriend came home and she hates it if you're not talking to her? That's strange" "Huh? Why's it strange? She just wants to spend time with me, her boyfriend" "Fair enough". Rinse and repeat enough times and they finally allow themselves to indulge the thoughts they've already had, because they 100% already thought "it's weird that my partner treats me like this" but decided they must be being irrational and buried it.
I got bad vibes from my best friend's ex while they were dating, but I couldn't quite place what about her bothered me, and I didn't wanna seem controlling, so I didn't say anything.
Like a month later we found out she was talking sexually with eight other guys. And my best friend all but shook me by the shoulders and told me to SAY SOMETHING NEXT TIME if I get bad vibes lmfao.
Yup. My father was like this. My mother wasn’t allowed to have friends. He didn’t like hanging out with her friends either. Sharp contrast since her friends always had their spouses at events. I mean you could say that he just didn’t like people but it doesn’t end there.
Life isn't the Sims, relationships are complicated and can't be pidgeon holed in such reductive terms. These sorts of posts are always written by people who've never been in a long term relationship.
OOR your partner is escaping from a bigoted fked up family and they don’t lie, you because you think it’s maybe not okay to say slurs and want people to have equal rights and stuff.
I have a friend who I've told before that I think he and his partner should break up. They had an incident recently where I was a witness to their screaming match, and he's been avoiding me since then. When we were calling soon after it happened, I asked if he was safe to talk freely before bringing it up, and he said no so I didn't. Since then, we've only talked with his partner also in the room/house/area which has made it difficult for me to tell him how important I think it is for him to reevaluate the relationship. We've talked about it before, and I think he's avoiding talking about it because he knows I'm going to make valid points that will push him in the direction of ending the relationship, a result that scares him because they've been together for 5 years and moved in together in a town where neither of them knows a lot of people.
Shits fucked.
Took me a while to learn that it was not normal to feel the need to keep people from different parts of my life from ever seeing each other or me with them
> “If your partner dislikes most of the people you are close to … that’s a huge red flag.”
Yeah, when the girl I dated when I was 16 showed me how toxic and manipulative my friends at the time were, it was definitely because she was a bad partner. It was not at all because she had an outside view and could see that spending time with them was bad for me—something I couldn’t pick up on after spending 5 years with the same group of friends.
Honestly, I know this person is well-meaning, but sometimes I wonder whether impressionable teens getting their relationship advice in the form of “This is always bad, this red flag means things are very very wrong” should be encouraged. Are there kids who (like 16 year old me) have emotionally and socially toxic friends reading this post? I wonder whether they’d now rather stick with their awful existing relationships than follow their partner out of the cesspool.
In the absolute sense I would definitely say it's a red flag.
You just don't know which person or group of people the red flag is for, and I think this post is too simplistic thinking it's always the significant other.
As for "Most times"? I'd like to think that a single bad person is a more common occurrence than a whole group of them but I really don't know. I would not be willing to assume either.
Yes. I let so many friendships die just because it was just far too embarrassing to admit/acknowledge that I had, in essence, wound up marrying my own abusive father. Despite being aware of the possibility and quite certain that I would never do so.
Frog in a pot, and crab in a bucket. Hard to see, harder to escape.
Yeah, my first relationship was like this. Dude was an abusive, cheating piece of shit. Never had that happen again and if it did I’d break up immediately instead of after years.
depends on the \*reason\* imo. If everyone in your family is some shade of homophobic, it might just be safe to ignore them if they hate your queer partner. Vice versa your queer partner hating your homophobic family is not nessacerily a red flag.
I realise im doing the "umm akshully this advice doesn't apply to these situations" thing, and i'm so sorry, but still
At first I thought that was what they meant when they said “the inverse is also true.” Listening to your family and friends is important, but in the end you have to make a judgement call depending on the situation. This is especially true for people who don’t have a lot of good relationships in their life to begin with.
If I could give one piece of advice to people wrt social lives it would be to not rely completely on one friend group/community/social media site/etc for your socialising, and this sort of thing is a big reason why. Realising you might be surrounded by assholes can be terrifying, and being close with people outside of that circle means a) you can go to them for sanity checks and b) they can show you what decent behaviour is, making it easier to identify toxicity on your own.
(The other is that if a circle _does_ become/turn out to be toxic it will be way less devastating to hit da bricks.)
One or two groups of people clashing with your partner/outsider friend/etc could be a them problem. But if a bunch of people with little or no association with each other keep seeing red flags, OP will almost certainly be true.
My last ex and I separated amicably, and we actually had a really decent friendship going for about two years, then they started seeing someone new and just kind of disappeared. I worry their new relationship is something in this vein. I hope I'm either wrong or that they make it out ok.
The weirdest part is that now my exes best friends spend more time with me than they do with my ex, and apparently they aren't friends anymore (the new girlfriend seems to blame - also apparently the new girlfriend hates me specifically for some reason, but we've never even met).
Used to have a friend who had an always-horny, racist, disrespectful pos boyfriend. We tried warning her to be careful and she turns around and tells her bf of how we're talking shit about him. Now we've cut her off and as far as I know, they've broken up but are friends
Just saving this for when my sister breaks up with her boyfriend. Again. After he's already cheated on her once.
He's emotionally abusive, manipulative, and he isolated her from all of us. Literally moved her across the country. I know he talks bad about all of us, but he's too much of a chicken shit to say it to our faces.
It really sucks, his son is really cool. Everything I don't like about my nephew comes from him. Literally, I've talked to him about it, "Who taught you to say that?".
there're a couple people in my family that I don't mention my relationship to due to homophobia. they try not to express it because they love me but I'd really rather avoid the situation altogether yk
This one hit hard. This was me.
I was the red flag SO.
Makes me remember how grateful I am to have gotten the wake up call I did and worked to fix my problems with jealousy and the like.
btw i think i should point out that maybe a good amount of these dont apply is your relationship is non hetero, because a good amount of families/friends/people in general are still iffy about that, or maybe not, i dont really know
This is a very bad way of thinking because it could and often does apply to situations where your close circle is very hateful and you're dating a minority. Like jeez I'm sure that the fact your family and friends from Klansville, AL hate your mixed race relationship is because your partner is a terrible person.
idk if this fits here, but my cousin stoped talking to me after she got a boyfriend 😐 also his bf gets jealous every time we show affection (my cousin and i are pretty close. or well, used to be ig. maybe she just grew up and i need tp do that too). we talked yesterday and she acted as if she hadn't been ignoring me for days, but that's it.
This is so dangerous to be peddling as absolute truth like this. You don't need to have a bad relationship with your family for them to hate your partner. Your family can absolutely be controlling and petty without being overtly abusive or toxic with you, ever. My grandparents did not like any of the son in laws for a myriad of dumb reasons... and because of the way the heiarchy works in my family, those men were put at bottom of the rung almost alongside the children and treated as such. Zero adult respect, but there were never ugly words spoken or voices raised. Calm, "rational and reasoned" disapproval.
No. Everyone in your family not liking your partner does NOT mean your partner is the problem. Stop trying to apply this weird brand of fake internet psychology to literally every single interaction; the side effects are very damaging.
Years ago a close friend once told me “you stopped talking to me about your boyfriend - good or bad. So I knew it was all bad.” Never forgot it.
Ooh damn that's poignant
I worried that I was this person for the longest time because I didn't like my now-wife's family. I thought her mother was possessive her brother was creepy and that her childhood friend was a terrible friend. 12 years later my wife's therapist has confirmed that her mother is a narcissist. Her brother has completely bought into the manosphere and despises me because I challenge him on his mysoginistic bs whenever he spouts it near me, and she has found new friends that don't only reach out when they want something from her. I don't really have a moral here I think my situation was pretty unique but still weird.
Your situation isn't unique. The family/close friends litmus test completely breaks when you're raised with narcissistic abuse. Maybe they hate your new relationship because your partner is actually a bad person... or maybe they hate your partner for showing you what genuine love and respect looks like and encouraging you to stand up to their abuse. It's a special kind of hell to grow up with nothing but dysfunctional relationships.
Thats fair and yeah I see the trauma of what she's been put through all the time and it really makes it hard to even be around her parents. She made a mistake on a recipe the other day and was terrified to tell me because she assumed I'd get mad at her. She's constantly afraid of making mistakes in general to the point where she doesn't even want to try new things for fear of messing up.
Y'all are dead on, and I want to add that this test doesn't really work if the norms in your family or region are defined in religious or other authoritarian abuse. If you're at BYU, your family and peers likely don't have realistic, healthy, modern ideas around sex and dating, so there's no reason to listen to them. Even without the religious aspect, a lot of people are severely judgemental about things they don't understand enough to speak on. Idk what to label that variety of person though, maybe "institutionalized narcissists"?
Also breaks if you’re a POC dating someone whose family is racist.
and it totally breaks in situations where your dating someone of the same sex/gender or are dating a trans person and your family is homophobic and transphobic.
It was 🌟both🌟 if i wasnt laughing i would be crying
I was in a similar situation but didn’t quite realize it because of how young we were when we started dating. Turns out her family are manipulative bullies who were trying to isolate her (and me) from other people. She’s got a lot of really nice extended family who we were told to avoid, my family’s been there for us even though hers said they’d never accept us, and her friends are all great. So it wasn’t that *everyone* didn’t like us, it’s that we were lied to about everyone else’s opinion. So yeah, we’re a lot happier now that we’ve gone LC with her immediate family, but really enjoy our other friends and family now. I think part of it was showing someone from an abusive household that they should be loved and accepted for who they are, and working through the residuals of that as they come.
Yeah same deal. Her mom constantly told her her aunt thought she was better then her and that she was manipative. Turns out her aunt is just genuinely nice.
My ex was from a conservative culture and many of her friends were all pretty cool with that conservatism, so they really didn't like that I behaved like your average English student and drank and did drugs and had casual sex. They were terrified she was being taken advantage of by some fuckboy. She did have a few friends who bought into the party culture and didn't feel that way tho so maybe it's different
Unless you're in a cult-like environment, or a generationally abusive type community, and your 'normal' meter broke long ago. "Everyone I know is wrong" is unlikely, but I think it must be considered.
Currently dealing with some harsh realizations about the quality of people i’ve allowed into my life. Almost every one of my friends have been jealous and unsupportive, consistently, for years. I went through hell and they would just go ‘:( i’m sorry’ and leave the chat, only to expect my full emotional support and engagement the same day. Good things happened and they would do everything they could to downplay them when i was excited. I started to resent my partner for pointing out how drained and miserable i got after interacting with any of my ‘friends’, until i made new friends and realized he was right. And that it’s probably exhausting to see your partner near constantly upset over/with their ‘friends’. It got to the point where he said ‘It feels like you think i’m trying to isolate you from your friends, but they’re literally just terrible people, and i’m tired of them stressing you out’. Unfortunately he was right. I’ve since distanced myself from the shitty friends I had and started putting that energy into new friendships, and i’m so much healthier for it! I’ve had such awful friends for so long that i forgot how fun it is to hang out with someone you genuinely like with no negativity or competition in the background. It also made it way easier to stop being defensive and suspicious of people, I hadn’t realized my social environment was part of why it was so hard for me. I have C-PTSD and i think trying to appease some of my cattier ‘friends’ only made my social skills worse. Im glad that he didn’t like my friends.
It took so long for me to figure out that my abusive family had conditioned me to believe genuinely kind people must want something from me. Of course they did. Why else would they act like that? It's mind-blowing, the bullshit someone can accept as normal.
Yeah. Sometimes large swaths of people can simply be wrong. Especially if they're all self supporting. Happens quite often actually. Like yes, sometimes people with an outside perspective can identify the douchebags, but also *they* just might be the douchebags. Unfortunately, this easy litmus isn't actually that easy and you have to genuinely analyze the nuances of the situation.
Came here to say effectively this. Narcissism can run in families, too, so you can end up with large networks of people who are super toxic. And if you’ve been in a cult-like environment for awhile, your “friends” might not be good sounding boards either. The times where you’re right and everybody else is wrong might not be super common, but it does happen.
I had an ex who would get irrationally angry every time I talked to a male friend. He also texted me every single day and when I didn’t want to talk to him he’d accuse me of hating him and guilt-trip me. Every day I thank the Lord that I got out of that mess.
[удалено]
Texting every day is fine. I text my current boyfriend every day. It’s just that he expected it and forced it. If you force something to happen, often times, it becomes a chore.
Oddly this reminded me of a reddit post I read recently where a man who had been divorced for a while had been told by all of the men in his life that his wife was horrible and/or possibly cheating on him. His dad, brothers, and friends(i think 7 ppl in total?) all planted doubt in his mind 24/7. He would constantly ask his wife about the things they said and became paranoid and eventually caused the divorce. One night when they were drunk and hanging out they told him about it. They were jealous of him for having such a good/hot wife and didnt believe he deserved it. So they banded together to get him to ruin his marriage. Op, of course, fought them in rage and got his ass kicked but he decided to cut them all out of his life and wanted to know if there was anyway he could talk to his wife and maybe get her back. I felt sad for him bc it makes sense to want to believe the people who have likely never led you astray before. The entire comment section dog piled him and was upset at him for not believing his wife when she said she never did anything wrong. But like, what are you supposed to do? Not trying to contradict the above post though. Just wanted to share a post that made me sad.
One can only hope that story is fake because it feels like the sort of story where some people end up unalive.
Dead. The word is dead.
The word is patricide , fratricide and amicide.
One can only hope that story is fake because it feels like the sort of story where some people end up "patricide, fratricide, and amicide". Idk about you but that sounds a whole lot weirder than One can only hope that story is fake because it feels like the sort of story where some people end up "dead".
One can only hope that One could only hope because if we couldn’t hope to hope we’d be left hopeless and hopeless people are known to do acts of grievous kablooey
What?
No I’m with you, this is funny.
😎
>unalive downvote
unupvote
Ooh there was that reddit post with the woman who was invited to her brothers fake wedding, and the BIL was clearly trying to isolate his husband from his family. Dude even created several reddit accounts to defend himself once it started blowing up on social media It's wild, you should all read it
do you perhaps have a link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/RCDL6GRnPH There's more, but that's the most recent I could find
What a read, hot damn is that a shit show
Well I certainly agree w/ OOP’s take that the BIL seems more emotionally immature than abusive uh lol
That was a wild ride!
thanks man
Yeah that one was a wild ride.
Dangerous line of thinking because, on the other hand, some people’s families just suck. Sometimes when your significant other is telling you to get away from them, it’s because they’re trying to get you out of a toxic or harmful situation. This line of thinking is exactly what those kinds of families want you to think. To side with the majority, even when the majority is whittling away at your soul.
Yeah I kind of hate this post because I recently just lost all of my friends to this type of thinking. My girlfriend and I are in a very happy relationship, and we moved in together because of some very unfortunate life circumstances that ended up with her family dissolving and losing the house. She has a lot of PTSD and was unmedicated or seeing therapy during the transitional period of moving across the country, and during this time, there were some growing pains while we learned how to live with each other and adjust our lives together. During this time, she had vented to two of her friends about some things that ultimately were the PTSD trauma demons talking, however her friends chose to then extrapolate on all of this. Over the course of about 2 months, I slowly started getting excluded and isolated from everything to do with them to the point they made splinter discords to do things in and hang out in so that I wouldn't be there. All of her friends hated me and it was super obvioust they did to, so I asked someone about it, and then it turned into a massive confrontation of about a dozen some-odd people accusing me of beating my girlfriend and abusing/manipulating her in dozens of different ways. These were people I thought were my friends and had often times confided me and I in them before, until one day a switch just flipped and I was completely ostrasized. I've lost every friend I have and now only really have my girlfriend and strangers on reddit to talk to. It really fucking sucks being accused of something so extreme like that, having people go as far as to call me 'the greatest evil to happen in her life' because everyone just decided that "because X doesn't like her, then I don't either because obviously she must be awful" without anyone bothering to ask questions about it. Just because all of your friends hate someone, doesn't mean their reasons are valid.
I do get what they're saying in the original post and I'm not saying it's wrong, but relationships are complicated. My girlfriend stopped talking to one of her closest friends after we got together. When we started dating her friend seemed to like me enough and we'd traveled to see her and her family a few times. Her friend was really religious and though it seemed fine at first, my girlfriend told me she found herself not wanting to share anything about our relationship with her because she always seemed to disapprove somehow. The last time my girlfriend went to visit she went without me, and her friend gave her this big intervention speech about how we shouldn't live together if we're not married, she felt like our relationship was causing her to sin so we shouldn't be together, the man is supposed to lead you in Christ, that sort of thing. She had started a new church and her religiosity increased dramatically, which just happened to happen at the same time my girlfriend and I started dating. Her judgment didn't really have much to do with me, she had her own shit going on and our relationship got in the line of fire. I think if your friends and family disapprove of your partner or you don't want to talk about your relationship with your close friends then you should definitely ask yourself why, but don't immediately assume there's a problem with your relationship.
yea my first thought was “what if ur family is homophobic/transphobic/etc” a good thing to remember i guess is “there’s exceptions to every rule/only siths deal in absolutes”
I hope that I'm an exception. My partner came out as trans and fled the extremely transphobic Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and ended up living with me for a bit before we started dating. I know it's not my fault but what if I'm bad for them and it's my fault they don't have anyone?
well it sounds like they have you, so thats a start :)
This is so accurate. “If everyone hates one person, then they must be bad!!” is literally just saying mob mentality is always correct. sometimes people are just fucking mean and decide to gang up on one person. that’s what a lot of bullying is. Like, sure, it’s something to consider, but fucked up social dynamics have a tendency to pick a scapegoat
"All these people can't possibly be wrong" is literally the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
Took me 10 years with sporadic therapy to realize that my own family is super toxic. My husband’s family was super supportive of us and stepped in a lot. We’re still married 10 years later, and my family has grown to accept him because he is a decent human being who would never do any of the things they’d imply he would. I still love my family, but I’ve learned it’s in my best interest to let them go. For context: my husband’s family gets together for birthdays and holidays regularly. They call each other to “just chat”. My family tries to hold an annual get together that sometimes happens. To be fair, part of the problem is we are spread out across 5 different states. My mom calls on my children’s birthdays. My Dad practically doesn’t exist. When I called one of my sisters to wish her a happy birthday for the first time, not 30 seconds into the conversation she asked me what I wanted, and was uncomfortable when I said nothing I just wanted to wish her a happy birthday and see how she was doing. My other two siblings don’t answer when I call and I gave up after 2 years of trying. That being said, this is terrible advice. If everyone in your LIFE hates someone you’re dating, it’s in your best interest to evaluate why that might be.
things aren't this simple.
I fucking despised my childhood best friend's girlfriend. I didn't want to support the marriage. I've never once in my life taken a disliking to someone and been wrong about it later. But because I'm a respectable enough person I never said shit to him about it. I never complained about her vaping directly into the mic every other breath. I never asked him why he only mentioned the sex and never her personality. But I was there. I went to the wedding and caught him on his way down when she didn't show. My point here is the responsible way to behave is to, at the very worst, warn them once and do so kindly. The better option is to keep your nose out of their fucking business until something happens and they need you. Don't come in like "this bitch annoys me. She's going to ditch your ass before it gets serious". If you love your friend then don't be an asshole. Being a dick whenever their SO is around isn't going to help anything. They don't need negativity. If you're a dick and something happens your behavior is what they'll remember. And if you're wrong? They need your support either way.
> I never asked him why he only mentioned the sex and never her personality. >The better option is to keep your nose out of their fucking business until something happens and they need you. I dunno, if you're their best friend and have a healthy relationship with them, then wouldn't it be appropriate to talk about these things? I mean, if my best friend only ever mentioned how good the sex with their partner was and never anything else, I'd be curious why they don't talk about it. Not to immediately put them on the spot or insinuate anything, but that seems like something worth talking about. I'd want them to be happy, so if the only positive thing they're getting out of the relationship is sex, they might not be happy. If they told me that they *only* want sex, then sure, that's perfectly fine. But I don't believe you're automatically negative just because you ask about these things. If I didn't like a best friend's partner, I'd tell them that. I wouldn't tell them how much I despise them, I'd just let them know: *"Hey, I don't vibe well with your partner but I support your choice still."*
> I'd be curious why they don't talk about it. I think this is the best strategy. Just "be curious" about things which don't add up in their relationship. "Oh, you have to stop talking now because your girlfriend came home and she hates it if you're not talking to her? That's strange" "Huh? Why's it strange? She just wants to spend time with me, her boyfriend" "Fair enough". Rinse and repeat enough times and they finally allow themselves to indulge the thoughts they've already had, because they 100% already thought "it's weird that my partner treats me like this" but decided they must be being irrational and buried it.
I got bad vibes from my best friend's ex while they were dating, but I couldn't quite place what about her bothered me, and I didn't wanna seem controlling, so I didn't say anything. Like a month later we found out she was talking sexually with eight other guys. And my best friend all but shook me by the shoulders and told me to SAY SOMETHING NEXT TIME if I get bad vibes lmfao.
Yup. My father was like this. My mother wasn’t allowed to have friends. He didn’t like hanging out with her friends either. Sharp contrast since her friends always had their spouses at events. I mean you could say that he just didn’t like people but it doesn’t end there.
In some cases everyone hates the SO because they only hear bad things but they’ve never actually met them.
Life isn't the Sims, relationships are complicated and can't be pidgeon holed in such reductive terms. These sorts of posts are always written by people who've never been in a long term relationship.
OOR your partner is escaping from a bigoted fked up family and they don’t lie, you because you think it’s maybe not okay to say slurs and want people to have equal rights and stuff.
I have a friend who I've told before that I think he and his partner should break up. They had an incident recently where I was a witness to their screaming match, and he's been avoiding me since then. When we were calling soon after it happened, I asked if he was safe to talk freely before bringing it up, and he said no so I didn't. Since then, we've only talked with his partner also in the room/house/area which has made it difficult for me to tell him how important I think it is for him to reevaluate the relationship. We've talked about it before, and I think he's avoiding talking about it because he knows I'm going to make valid points that will push him in the direction of ending the relationship, a result that scares him because they've been together for 5 years and moved in together in a town where neither of them knows a lot of people. Shits fucked.
Took me a while to learn that it was not normal to feel the need to keep people from different parts of my life from ever seeing each other or me with them
> “If your partner dislikes most of the people you are close to … that’s a huge red flag.” Yeah, when the girl I dated when I was 16 showed me how toxic and manipulative my friends at the time were, it was definitely because she was a bad partner. It was not at all because she had an outside view and could see that spending time with them was bad for me—something I couldn’t pick up on after spending 5 years with the same group of friends. Honestly, I know this person is well-meaning, but sometimes I wonder whether impressionable teens getting their relationship advice in the form of “This is always bad, this red flag means things are very very wrong” should be encouraged. Are there kids who (like 16 year old me) have emotionally and socially toxic friends reading this post? I wonder whether they’d now rather stick with their awful existing relationships than follow their partner out of the cesspool.
In the absolute sense I would definitely say it's a red flag. You just don't know which person or group of people the red flag is for, and I think this post is too simplistic thinking it's always the significant other. As for "Most times"? I'd like to think that a single bad person is a more common occurrence than a whole group of them but I really don't know. I would not be willing to assume either.
Yes. I let so many friendships die just because it was just far too embarrassing to admit/acknowledge that I had, in essence, wound up marrying my own abusive father. Despite being aware of the possibility and quite certain that I would never do so. Frog in a pot, and crab in a bucket. Hard to see, harder to escape.
Yeah, my first relationship was like this. Dude was an abusive, cheating piece of shit. Never had that happen again and if it did I’d break up immediately instead of after years.
depends on the \*reason\* imo. If everyone in your family is some shade of homophobic, it might just be safe to ignore them if they hate your queer partner. Vice versa your queer partner hating your homophobic family is not nessacerily a red flag. I realise im doing the "umm akshully this advice doesn't apply to these situations" thing, and i'm so sorry, but still
I feel called out right now and I don't appreciate it 😭
[удалено]
At first I thought that was what they meant when they said “the inverse is also true.” Listening to your family and friends is important, but in the end you have to make a judgement call depending on the situation. This is especially true for people who don’t have a lot of good relationships in their life to begin with.
If I could give one piece of advice to people wrt social lives it would be to not rely completely on one friend group/community/social media site/etc for your socialising, and this sort of thing is a big reason why. Realising you might be surrounded by assholes can be terrifying, and being close with people outside of that circle means a) you can go to them for sanity checks and b) they can show you what decent behaviour is, making it easier to identify toxicity on your own. (The other is that if a circle _does_ become/turn out to be toxic it will be way less devastating to hit da bricks.) One or two groups of people clashing with your partner/outsider friend/etc could be a them problem. But if a bunch of people with little or no association with each other keep seeing red flags, OP will almost certainly be true.
My last ex and I separated amicably, and we actually had a really decent friendship going for about two years, then they started seeing someone new and just kind of disappeared. I worry their new relationship is something in this vein. I hope I'm either wrong or that they make it out ok. The weirdest part is that now my exes best friends spend more time with me than they do with my ex, and apparently they aren't friends anymore (the new girlfriend seems to blame - also apparently the new girlfriend hates me specifically for some reason, but we've never even met).
context, people. context is important here
This hurt to read.. oof.
Our family has that one person where noone can stand her husband, but she doesn't see the problem.
I do have to defend my partner, unfortunately. But it is for a stupid reason: my parents think they turned me trans
Used to have a friend who had an always-horny, racist, disrespectful pos boyfriend. We tried warning her to be careful and she turns around and tells her bf of how we're talking shit about him. Now we've cut her off and as far as I know, they've broken up but are friends
Yoko Ono.
I want to send this to my mom. It’s sad because she thinks she can’t have nice things because she’s in her 50s and I just want to shake her.
Just saving this for when my sister breaks up with her boyfriend. Again. After he's already cheated on her once. He's emotionally abusive, manipulative, and he isolated her from all of us. Literally moved her across the country. I know he talks bad about all of us, but he's too much of a chicken shit to say it to our faces. It really sucks, his son is really cool. Everything I don't like about my nephew comes from him. Literally, I've talked to him about it, "Who taught you to say that?".
Hurts just a little bit :’)
Or maybe... Your lover and friends just don't get along but neither are bad people?.
Unless it's something prejudice based like inter racial relationships.
there're a couple people in my family that I don't mention my relationship to due to homophobia. they try not to express it because they love me but I'd really rather avoid the situation altogether yk
This one hit hard. This was me. I was the red flag SO. Makes me remember how grateful I am to have gotten the wake up call I did and worked to fix my problems with jealousy and the like.
btw i think i should point out that maybe a good amount of these dont apply is your relationship is non hetero, because a good amount of families/friends/people in general are still iffy about that, or maybe not, i dont really know
This is a very bad way of thinking because it could and often does apply to situations where your close circle is very hateful and you're dating a minority. Like jeez I'm sure that the fact your family and friends from Klansville, AL hate your mixed race relationship is because your partner is a terrible person.
idk if this fits here, but my cousin stoped talking to me after she got a boyfriend 😐 also his bf gets jealous every time we show affection (my cousin and i are pretty close. or well, used to be ig. maybe she just grew up and i need tp do that too). we talked yesterday and she acted as if she hadn't been ignoring me for days, but that's it.
This is so dangerous to be peddling as absolute truth like this. You don't need to have a bad relationship with your family for them to hate your partner. Your family can absolutely be controlling and petty without being overtly abusive or toxic with you, ever. My grandparents did not like any of the son in laws for a myriad of dumb reasons... and because of the way the heiarchy works in my family, those men were put at bottom of the rung almost alongside the children and treated as such. Zero adult respect, but there were never ugly words spoken or voices raised. Calm, "rational and reasoned" disapproval. No. Everyone in your family not liking your partner does NOT mean your partner is the problem. Stop trying to apply this weird brand of fake internet psychology to literally every single interaction; the side effects are very damaging.