Situation in as few words as possible: my oldest daughter (almost 17) is dating a 20 year-old guy. On their first date, they went downtown (he doesn’t drive) and he bought her a $70.00 necklace (we made her give it back; that’s just too much for so early in a relationship). They were using the “L-word” less than 2 weeks after they started dating. But here’s the part that really worries me: if she mentions to him that she was doing anything with a guy (she has a couple of fairly close guy friends) he gets all angry and hangs up the phone on her and stuff. This has gotten to a point where she has asked us to lie to her boyfriend: she went for a walk the other day with her friend Paul, and said “If Daniel calls, just tell him I went for a walk with Jessica, he gets upset if he knows I’m hanging out with Paul”. So, he freaks at the mere mention of another guy, and then a few hours later, he calls to tell her how much he loves her, and couldn’t live without her, and is probably going to get her name tattooed on his chest!
Oh, in addition to all of this, when I asked her what he does for a living, she told me he gets disability because he huffed so much gasoline when he was younger that he sustained permanent brain damage. :eek:
I tried to tell her that, to me, his behavior so far sounds pre-abusive, if you will. It’s my understanding that most abusive guys start out with this kind of jealousy, control, and manipulation stuff. She says she doesn’t know how much longer the relationship will last. Hubby says if the relationship doesn’t end soon, he might have a talk with the boy, and let him know what kind of trouble to expect if it ever turns abusive.
If you have contrary experiences, please let me know. If you have experiences or opinions that back mine up, I'd like to hear about that, too.
Yes, he absolutely sounds dangerous to me.
He sounds like a guy I dated when I was in college. As in your daughter’s experience, he was a few years older than I was, and very jealous at the mention of any guy friends. We didn’t go to the same college, and he was even jealous of males at my school that I barely knew. I can clearly recall a day when I was wearing a skirt and he assumed that I was “dressing up for some guy”. I stupidly stayed with him for over a year and he just got worse. He escalated to punching walls and destroying my property, then actually tried to strangle me one night. He would often fall back on the “If you leave me, I’ll kill myself” tactic and I fell for it more than once.
This kind of behavior just doesn’t get better, in my experience. It’s not like he will suddenly become more secure and trusting. The ante almost always gets upped, in fact.
The fact that he has some type of brain injury from huffing gas may even indicate that he has a serious impulse-control disorder and could become violent.
I hope your daughter extricates herself from this. I really do.
This guy has big-time control issues (among other things), and the chance for your daughter to have a happy relationship with him is really quite small.
Sadly, telling her this may just re-inforce her determination to be with him.
Whatever you decide to do, please don’t lie for her.
I’d suggest an upfront but non-judgemental chat about your concerns, and tell her you won’t lie for her. If things go poorly, consider either family counselling, or having Uncle Vinnie chat with the boyfriend and tell him how the last boyfriend who displeased him now sleeps with the fishes. And how pleased Uncle Vinnie would be if this new boyfriend moved to another state. Or planet.
i think you know well enough no amount of contrary experience should convince you not to explain to your daughter why the relationship might be a bad idea.
I know you’re at least partly kidding, but that’s still a bad idea. He might very well say to himself, “Man, her family is so controlling—she needs me to rescue her!” Or “Oh yeah? Well, they’re not gonna scare ME away!” He’s already showing signs of instability: who knows how he might escalate.
That said, however, when norinew’s daughter decides she’s had enough of this guy, her family would do well to present a united front. Refusing to give info to Mr. Necklace; escorting her to and from wherever she goes (not to scare him off, just to give her a layer of protection), screening her calls, and so forth. People like that tend to look for the weak link in a family: a younger sibling who will blab anything, or grandma who doesn’t want to stand in the way of Young Love. Be advised! And good luck.
The main chunk of your OP is standard issue adolescent/post-adolescent relationship drama except for this -
I also have a 17 year old daughter, and I realize with great clarity that it can be near impossible to enforce your will unilaterally on a near adult, but having said that, I would be employing every weapon in my arsenal short of a shotgun and a shovel to move her off the notion that dating hufferboy is a good idea.
Brain damaged, ex-huffer, jealous BFs are an intensely bad, bad, bad idea.
I’m going to be honest in that you had me at “my oldest daughter (almost 17) is dating a 20 year-old guy.”
disclaimer: I know that a LOT of relationships work with such a small age difference. I know that not all relationships with age differences aas such are bad.
But, I am kind of noided out as to why a college aged man would want to date a high schooler.
This guy is bad, bad news. He’s controlling, jealous, manipulative, and has a history of huffing. The longer this goes on, the more trapped she’s going to get. I’m not sure how you can best explain this to a 17-year-old (having been a 17-year-old in a less-than-stellar relationship many moons ago), but if nothing else you should point out that the fact that she has to ask her parents to lie for her should tell her something.
Ask her if she likes having male friends, because she won’t have any if she stays with this jackass. Or at least, she’ll never be able to see them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if before long some of her female friends become “unacceptable”.
I agree that three years isn’t always a problem (my father is three years older than my mother and they’ve been married for almost thirty-two years now), but the difference between in-high-school and not-in-high-school is so great that even as little as a year can make all the difference in the world.
norinew, I don’t know if you get Baltimore news out there, but a 17-year-old girl here was just severely beaten by her 20-something boyfriend. She’s in a coma with brain damage. Story here
The article is mostly about the girl’s condition, but on the TV news, they said he was very possesive and controlling, keeping her from her friends, and trying to keep her from her family. The two of them had just moved in together, and he was trying to talk her out of going on to college. Very scary situation.
I hope you can talk to your daughter, and make her see the reality of her situation.
Nah, he sounds like a real nice, upstanding guy. Real asset to the community and all that. Only thing that could improve the situation is if he were unemployed, too.
Smeghead, he is unemployed.
He’s on disability because he’s brain-damaged from huffing gasoline.
Just a pillar of the community and all that, ain’t he? :rolleyes:
If you have to ask then you have enough concern to know the answer to your question. Please let your concern be magnified by geometric proportions due to the reinforcement expressed herein.
Send your daughter to boarding school or the walled convent asap.
I work with plenty of former solvent/aromatics sniffers (in a jail) who are far less disabled than this person and they can be spotted a mile off.
Hard drug users in general seem to have a hard time controlling their impulses, and even though sniffing solvents is not considered hard in the sense of crack or heroin, the solvent abusers all have some sort of personality disorder.
Usually it is a lack of any patience, an inability to see other courses of action and thought until it is pointed out to them in the most direct manner and they switch moods extremely rapidly and go to the extremes of that mood in the process.
Me ? I’d really want to know what happened to previous relationships this individual has had, what is this person like with his parents, and how does this person handle situations that are not to his liking, and of course, who does he hang out with - since the company one keeps can say a good deal.
Trying to frighten her off may or may not work, but careful persuasion might, especially if you ask her if her other freind behave in this way, or maybe ask her if she thinks the way he does behave is normal, and why others do not act like this.
Try to get her to assess him, it’s a useful thing for her to learn in any path she chooses to take in life, try and get her to ask herself quections about him, and to compare how he behaves against the way others around her behaves.
Please get some professional advice regarding domestic violence and abusive relationships. This one sounds classic. Also, look into your state’s laws regarding what is generally called statutory rape.
Your daughter may be strong-willed, however, you are still reponsible for her well-being. Based upon my experience, (I am a police officer), the odds are she will be sexually active with him before long, and, not only will he be beating her up, she will be covering for him and thinking it’s her fault.
I don’t know how you’d go about getting the information, but it would be good to know if this guy has a record. Your daughter is probably not the first young girl he’s gotten involved with. What happened to the others when they tried to get rid of him? Maybe one or more of them had to go to police.
Your daughter deserves better, and I hope she figures this out soon.
Send your daughter to stay with relatives in some other part of the country.
Consider hiring a private detective to put a good scare into the freak. This may sound extreme, but the potential for serious violence just looms over this whole scenario.
Perhaps it is because I am on the entirely opposite side of the personality spectrum, but I really don’t understand why there are so many guys that are jealous control freaks like this fellow. Maybe I’m just such a mellow guy, or because I get a lot out of making *other * people happy, but the whole control freak thing is really hard for me to understand.
Personally I think the drug abuse is a bigger red flag. I’d be concerned about the fact that this guy huffed gasoline to the point of being brain damage (hell, maybe the brain damage explains his OTHER problems! ) because I know that drug addicts have the potential to be incredibly selfish- I’d hate to see it played out again.
I’d watch them very carefully. You already have a lot of warning signs- the moment this guy does anything wrong lay the hammer down HARD. You have the advantage of seeing the warning signs early, so you will (hopefully) not excuse any inappropriate behavior from him.
angrily wonders why women seem to be drawn to guys like this one