My girlfriend and I (38M) have been together for almost 8 years. I love her, and I love her family (mother, father, younger sister).
Some quick background info:
Girlfriend – super empath. She feels incredibly intensely and picks up and dwells on emotions (even via text)
Sister – has borderline personality disorder and is incredibly toxic. She is an adult in her mid-late 20s.
For 8 years, I have been watching as my gf and her family continuously do almost everything they can to make sisters life better. The sister threatens on a regular basis to kill herself. She had a kid 2 years ago, and now she threatens regularly to put the kid up for adoption. As I see it, these are manipulation tactics so the family keeps giving her money, paying her rent, and whatever else she wants. Meanwhile she makes zero effort to budget her own sources of income. My gf and the sister used to be VERY close. Now my gf, for the entire time we’ve been together, frequently gets contacted by the sister who’s in a “panic”. when I say frequent, sometimes it’s several times a week. Other times it’s just several times a month. almost every time the sister calls my gf in a panic, the mood in the house is incredibly heavy and it’s not too disimilar from the feeling as if there was a serious injury or accident in the family. This is a situation I’ve more or less gotten accustomed to, despite the fact that it’s driving the entire family to bankruptcy and making everybody miserable.
However, since Christmas she’s been dating this clown that is mentally, emotionally, and probably physically abusive. They break up several times a month, and are back together within days. The sister pays many of HIS bills, despite not being able to pay her own. It has become clear that she is not going to leave him. Since this guy has been in the picture, my gf deals with situations weekly, and it always devastates her.
I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to ask her to choose “me or the sister”. Im confident she’s incapable of just opting to care less about the sister. The current mood at home, is like someone in the family died 2 or 3 times a month. Im not sure I can live in this environment.
I have talked to all members of the family many times over the years. What the sister needs is some tough love, because her behavior will never change unless she’s forced to face some consequences. But the family is so terrified to force her to face consequences out of fear that she will either kill herself, or put the daughter up for adoption (even though I’ve explained the latter is not that simple). The sister is just never hesitant to remind everybody all the time that she wants to die or she wants to get rid of the kid.
My gf is leaving for 2 years to go to school far away from here in August. Long distance relationships are incredibly difficult, even under the best circumstances. With things being the way they are right now, I have no faith we can make it. I don’t know what to do to improve our odds… Or if I should just cut the chord and break up with her before she goes.
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
5 comments
Her sisters drama will become your drama if she can’t learn boundaries.
Is she in therapy? Do you think she will ever change? She is going to have this same stress while in school and it could affect here performance. You will be on the phone trying to encourage her and make thinks right from far away for hours at a time. Is it worth it?
Yeah, your GF will not finish college. Her sister will either force her to quit or get her so caught up in drama she will fail. If in 8 years it hasn’t gotten better it never will. Just imagine having kids and that sister getting jealous because your gf is giving her own kid attention instead of her or her kid. Your kid is always going to be second fiddle to his aunt.
Your girlfriend has no boundaries and is leaving for two years?
Sustaining this relationship sounds somewhere between exhausting and impossible.
I’d make a clean break since the move gives a natural point for that to happen, rather than letting your relationship slowly erode until all that’s left is long distance and resentment.
Your girlfriend doesn’t ever have to care about her sister less, but she does need to learn how to have boundaries. And to realize that having healthy boundaries is loving and essential to sustaining relationships.
Maybe see if you can budget how much you give the sister. Make sure that she doesn’t spend money on his bills instead of hers by cutting out the middle man and directly giving the money to whoever she pays bills to so that you know it’s going towards what it should be. Maybe do something similar with budgets for food, like go shopping with her and paying for her food items instead of giving her money and trusting her to buy food with it.