None of mine actually present arguments – just forwarding around nonsense. I’ve seen the same picture of a black guy holding a Confederate battle flag at least five times, and not one person seems to realize that they might as well be forwarding around a picture of themselves with a black person to prove they’re not racist.
My sister is born-again, but she is the good kind ™ that actually practices Christian values. Mostly she says things like “It’s all I can do to behave as well as I can myself, I don’t have the energy to police other people.” She believes the holy spirit speaks to her from time to time, but so far the voices in her head have not made her anything but more pleasant. Anyway, she loves me and at least likes my husband.
My husband, on the other hand, has three older sisters, all Japanese, so their issues are not religious or political, but cultural. A couple of them have said, probably unintentionally, mean things to him since we got married a couple of months ago, like “why don’t you wear a dress if you want to be gay?” So it’s ignorance, pure and simple. He got mad at the oldest sister (well into her 80’s but still very independent) and she said something kind of odd - that she doesn’t care if he doesn’t want to see her, but she wants to see me (assuming we visit next year). Maybe she wants to welcome me into the family.
Relatives is weird.
Well no. Your talking family there and that also includes issues like inheritance and possibly grandchildren. So for example if your about to have your daughter take over the family business and she marries someone you dont like, do you support the union? Remember a divorce could mean that person gets half? What if you sense a fraud or a person only who’s out to take the family money?
I avoid that by not having any money. The girls understand that we fully and honestly intend to spend all our assets in retirement, hopefully needing to pick up cans along the freeway to cover rthe last few years.
You are mixing business with family. Who your daughter choose to marry is her decision. Your hypothetical is exactly what prenuptual agreements are for.
It all depends on if my daughter is happy. And inheritance wouldn’t have anything to do with it – the love I will have for my future children will be unconditional, as will my estate (though, depending on its size, a portion of it may go to charity, regardless of what my children do).
. . . and why do you specify “daughter”? Is it because you feel you need to intervene to protect a girl child more than a boy child?
Any child can make a bad releationship decision and gert hurt. I also worry that you are (hypothetically) more concerned with your child’s finances than their emotional health. Makes you sound like a cold-hearted Scrooge.
Two weeks ago, my bf and I got engaged (or for clarity, I’ll use the vomit-inducing word “engayged” that one of my friends had used).
Although my parents are areligious (pretty much atheists/apatheists), they are definitely tea party marching, Newsmax reading, red state Republicans. We have going mano-a-mano regarding gay rights and marriage specifically. They used to be for “traditional marriage”, but I relentlessly shamed them about the fact that they both got divorces to be with each other and haven’t spawned any children since they remarried. They eventually conceded and are both supportive of our engagement and the ruling.
As for my fiance’s family, well, that’s where it gets weird. He was raised (and still is) Catholic. His 95 year old mother is Catholic and is supportive-ish as far as we can tell.
The rest of the family is…well, ugh. Half of his brothers and sisters became Jehovah’s Witnesses back in the 80s. So, while they’re not political and don’t vote at all so the SCOTUS decision isn’t a blip for them, the whole gay thing is still a no-no. The JW sister is accepting of my fiance and when he visits solo, he can stay with her. When we visit together, we will have dinner together, but then we go to a hotel instead (fine by me, really). Apparently the JW culture of snitching on each other is quite problematic and I have feeling his sister is actually OK with everything but has to keep up appearances.
On the plus side, the whole SCOTUS decision was also a great way to weed out the invite list.
BUTT THE FUCK OUT, and support your kid they are smarter than you believe is what I’d tell myself.
I’m not gay but I have experience in the scenario you outlined, and they were fucking blind to not see that what they saw as throwing my life away was and is from my perspective the smartest thing I’ve ever done and turned me into a functioning human being with the ability to live in the world.
Well, tough. First of all, you are going to die. We are all going to die. So you can’t retain control forever.
Secondly, if you truly detect a scam, you have some options. You could try to, I don’t know, talk to him or her? Find evidence? You can also limit the powers the kid has through your attorney, if you really believe.
But most of the time it’s just disapproval. Like my Jewish friend’s mother, who refused to go to his wedding to a Christian girl. That was fifteen years ago. They are still married. As far as he is concerned, it is for life. That means this mean old mother missed her only son’s only wedding because she couldn’t get over her stupid outdated beliefs. She chose that over love. And I just don’t believe that a loving god would mandate that.
There are many ways to deal with an offended child, chief among them not to offend them in the first place. Even if you 100% disapprove of the marriage, coming down like a ton of bricks is likely to just drive the child further into their arms.
I am in a relationship that was highly disapproved of by my parents. It has been one of the best things in my world, but my mom didn’t like him because he’s not Hindu, not Indian, etc. She didn’t forgive me until her literal deathbed. How many years wasted and gone because she couldn’t let go of her prejudices?
But, if you’d rather choose beliefs over love, fine. Just be prepared to pay the price, too.
Withholding love or affection, from those who have cause to expect it from you, in an attempt to shape their actions, is page one, chapter one, in the manipulation handbook, I believe!
It amounts to using your emotional currency to bully someone into what YOU think best.
There comes a time when, “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command!”. Once they are adults, they will have to face the consequences of their bad choices, not you. If they face the consequences, THEIR call to make. Not yours.
It’s possible to have good intentions while doing this (possible), but it’s still incredibly damaging.
It tells your kid(s) that you don’t love them unconditionally. You only love them if they obey your commands.*
Don’t be surprised if their love for you becomes conditional, too.
- And anyone who tries to argue that you aren’t “commanding” when it’s an adult child – you’re trying to keep the power/authority over their lives. Your kids have grown up learning that you (are supposed to) obey mom and dad. It’s ridiculous to think that imprinting magically disappears the moment they turn 18. And part you KNOWS it doesn’t, because you’re banking on that when you try to “persuade” them to defer to your wishes.
Don’t throw away somebody’s dearly heartfelt Christmas card unopened!
Open that shit to check for money.
Congratulations to you and your husband. I can’t even imagine how happy you must be with the decision. I’m straight*, and I’m thrilled, so it must be an incredible feeling.
As for your dad, I would give it time for things to settle down before responding. I have hope for him since he attended your wedding. He’s probably just a bit shocked at the moment.
As for your step-mom, she’s a lost cause. I would also send the cards back to her. I wouldn’t want her to think for one second, that I accepted a card that excluded my spouse.
*I really don’t like the term straight, it implies that being gay is “bent or twisted”.
That’s my strategy, mainly with my mother. If I’ve had a couple of drinks, I tend to call her out on some of the crap she posts (“Washington never said that,” etc.) We’re all happier this way - she still sees my stuff, I still get alerts when she posts - which I can hover over and decide whether it’s something personal or just some new ideological idiocy, but I don’t miss things like “Great-Aunt Bertha passed today, wake tomorrow, funeral Saturday.”
My brother-in-law is gay, and my in-laws are deeply religious. However, they made a lot of mental adjustments after BIL came out, and accept that their son is who he is, and they love him anyway. Things were quite ugly at first, though. Similar experience for my gay cousin, but his mother went even further than the in-laws: from the stereotypical redneck, conservative, gay-bashing hick that she was, she’s now a rainbow-flag-waving proud mama of a gay man*.
I hope that your father can make that journey, too. It’s worthwhile.
*Gotta say, though, having known my cousin since he was born - there was never a closet for him to come out of. I always - from the time he was a little kid and I was only a few years older - knew he was gay, long before I knew words like “gaydar,” long before I knew there was anything religiously or politically significant about his innate preferences. He just was.
And to be honest, it really would make more sense the other way around. “Straight” implying you have tendencies straight along your gender, or something like that. Hetero is probably better.
My daughter-in-law’s parents are OK with gay marriage. In fact her father is a preacher and he married his daughter to my daughter. This was a couple of years ago.
As gays have co-opted the word “gay” implying that non-gays aren’t happy, I have no problem with “straight” being co-opted implying gays are twisted. It seems entirely symmetric to me.
Have they? Really? I haven’t seen this!
If you’ll look into the history of the word, I think you’ll find that it wasn’t a conspiracy by homosexuals to deprive you of a redundant adjective, but a case of a word being used in slang to refer to both “loose” women and homosexuals, i.e., people whose sexuality contravened social norms.
Moral: if you don’t want to lose words you like, don’t use them against other people. See also: queer.
Ahem…
Hee! They’re tea-partiers; they don’t even help their own child with medical expenses. They’re sure not sending me money, they’re just using holidays to insult me and my husband. I’ve got half a mind to send her, alone, a Christmas card in return – one such message ought to be sufficient. These are the sort of people who do not tolerate the shoe being put on the other foot!
On a MUCH happier note: I finally heard from my own dear mother, after being scared for days of what she might say. Now she is a fairly weird person, a conservative and religious but very wary of authority and establishments. She was also trained as a lawyer, and has very strong but often weird legal opinions – for example after watching the OJ trial from beginning to end she will defend his innocence until her death, based on some arcane point or other, I forget which. Not just his legal innocence - his factual innocence.
Anyway, on the basis of Full Faith & Credit alone, she is 100% for the SCOTUS ruling and brimming with congratulations. She may believe in Traditional Marriage as a religious matter, but she is clear on what the government’s position should and must be, and it’s sure not to enforce the Bible or any other religious text. Whew!