I’ve heard of honesty, but this seems almost extreme. By itself, it’s noble, harmless, even cute. But considering you’re a victim of felony theft, it needs to be bookmarked.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying your fiancé knew or had something to do with this, but your fiancé’s tendencies are radically, diametrically at odds with your stb SIL’s.
Has your fiancé confronted her? If not, that would raise more questions in my mind.
I was encouraged when you said that your fiancée confronted her sister. That showed that your future wife has got your back.
Which means this doesn’t have to be a deal breaker… at least it wouldn’t be for me (and I’m unforgiving when it comes to stealing or lying). If you decide you can’t deal with the rest of her family, could the two of you move away?
My family’s full of “tightie whities”, who think Trump’s too liberal. Me and my multi-ethnic socialist wife have to vent, after even a short phone call with them. But, even living in the same state, we only have to deal with them for Thanksgiving dinner and maybe Christmas Eve.
This isn’t a “family problem”, this is felony theft.
It’s both.
If it’s a crime, it’s public business and the greater community has an interest. This supersedes any ridiculous omertà bullshit.
As I don’t want to thread-jack, I’ll make this my last post on this particular point.
You could certainly argue as you have, and in a sense, I can’t really argue that it’s not a public matter. But since the perpetrator and victim are family in this case, I guess I’d be willing to make it an exception and give his fiance’s sister/family time to work this out and make good. If we were talking about violent crime, sexual assault, or other crimes that endanger someone’s long-term well-being then that’s a different story. I see this as potentially resolvable.
Agree to disagree, I reckon.
It’s not a gang, it’s a club.
The bank is also a victim.
And an active thief is someone everyone needs to warned about.
I’m familiar with a couple of people who are that McNugget level of “honest”. I put honest in scare quotes because of these people there are two very different mental processes going on. One is genuine honesty and a deep-seated sense of fair play. An aversion to getting an undeserved advantage. Being a good citizen in all respects.
The other is far more sinister. It’s a deep seated aversion to being taken advantage of, with a thin veneer of pseudo-fair play on top. They love to tout the times they gave back the McNugget but ignore the far more numerous times they accuse everyone around them in the family of bad faith in attempting to short them a McNugget. Which gets very very tiresome, having to continually defend against charges of malfeasance over what’s simply the random variation of daily life. Things cannot possible be made fair enough to stop the accusations.
My amateur psychologist streak tells me the person I’m referring to grew up in a family with some thieves and some parents who made excuses for thieves or were blind to theivery. Whether it was food off your plate at age 5, or allowance money out of your piggy bank at age 10, or stealing your BF/GF at age 15, this person has perceived they have to defend their share of everything all the time. It’s psycho.
I’m in no position to say which profile the OP’s fiancé fits. But my personal “Danger Will Robinson” signal is still making lots of noise almost 60 posts after I first made that reference.
Another thing that may merit consideration: if you invoke the criminal or civil justice system(s), you’ll learn what you probably already know.
The Courts don’t actually mete out justice*
So an attempt to have her arrested and prosecuted, and/or an attempt at a civil suit to recover the stolen funds could be unsuccessful.
And when you take a shot at the King, you had better not miss.
It really is an absolutely awful situation. You have my sympathies.
*“If you want justice, go to a whorehouse. If you wanna get fucked, go to court.”
– “Primal Fear”
@LSLGuy, good post.
Yeah, I go back to that example because it stands out in my mind as being unusual, and it’s a fact that stands in diametric, polar opposition to the offense explained in the OP. In short, it’s a weird coincidence that such an in-your-face theft (not to mention the staggering amount) could be perpetrated by the sister of someone who is honest to a fault. I’m not saying that the sister’s in on it; I’m saying these two sets of facts require explanation and reconciliation, in my view – beyond just the crime itself.
My deeper concern is that honesty, the appearance of honesty, can be weaponized by dishonest people. That’s not to say that the sister is in on it, but again, there’s a deeper level of explanation that is required beyond getting the sister to confess. Like, what the fuck is really going on here?
Is this a case of the OP’s SIL being pathologically jealous of the OP’s fiance, to the point where she’d want to destroy her/their marriage?
Are there family politics and dynamics that are being concealed underneath that “tightly knit” family appearance that the OP sees on the surface?
Is there a lot of family drama that is being unseen and that the OP is really only now getting his first sight of that ice berg’s tip?
Has the sister, or has anyone in the family, done something like this before? Is this like a case of the crazy aunt that’s chained to a pole in the basement that everyone in the family just agrees not to talk about?
A tightly knit family can seem like Normal Rockwell painting on the surface, but it might be hiding some gaping holes in the wall.
I think that’s where I’m going with this. I wouldn’t get married until I started asking some questions and getting answers that really made sense.
Sorry, I know I’m ‘hogging the ball’ on this thread but I wanted to add another thought to my last post: this act - any act like this - has roots and has a history behind it. It didn’t just come out of nowhere. It didn’t just happen.
There’s a reason she did this. If I wanted this relationship to continue, I’d want to know why this happened. I’d really want to know what this was about. I suspect that the sister - or at minimum someone else in the family - knows the possible motivations but is reluctant to say something.
I see this act as being one of two things: either the SIL is acting out and doing this to screw over the sister or to be disruptive and to bring attention to herself, or she’s just a real witch of a person and did this out of a pathological sense of entitlement and feeling entitled to other people’s shit.
If the OP’s (possible future) SIL is doing this because she’s pathologically jealous, I suspect that the family knows this, and I frankly suspect the sister knows it. Pathological jealousy doesn’t just come out of nowhere.
On the other hand, if it’s a case of the sister being a black sheep in an otherwise good family, I suspect the family knows that, too. I suspect that this is probably not the first time that she’s given off warning signs that she’s a problem child. I suspect that things like this have happened before and this tight-knit family has covered her ass. Again, things like this don’t just come out of nowhere. People test boundaries. People push boundaries. We all do. Not like this, but we all, on some level, operate according to boundaries whether we realize it or not. Something tells me that she might well have pushed these boundaries outward over the years and that nobody dared stop her. It’s dealt with internally as a family – and since he mentioned it, I have to confess that this possible explanation supports the line of reasoning and argument that @MrDibble has made about the justification for taking control outside the family and putting it into the hands of prosecutors.
Such a shitty position to be in, @superdude I feel for ya. Good luck whatever you decide.
@asahi 2 posts up. Exactly.
I now see my post didn’t make my distinction quite as clear as I meant. Trying again:
I know various people on the “unusually honest” end of the spectrum. Some of those people are legitimately just unusually good and actively unselfish people. Others of those people are psychos compensating for something ugly inside. No one person has both sets of behaviors / motivations.
IME all the ones way out at the “one extra McNugget” end are the psychos.
@asahi 1 post up. An excellent contribution. Echoes my sentiments exactly.
Yeah, the OP describes somewhere else that the fiance meticulously keeps receipts of whenever she uses his ATM. In my mind, there seems to be almost an obsessive preoccupation with demonstrating her honesty to a fault, which strikes me as odd. Without knowing her, I can’t judge her, but I can say that in my experience, this by itself would strike me as weird but it would be just an otherwise cute and funny little quirk if there was no grand theft involved.
It’s the quirk + grand theft that = really, really deep suspicion on my admittedly distant end.
Whatever, what’s really important here is that @superdude understand that he did not create this situation. He is the victim. He should feel absolutely no guilt at all if he decides to put the brakes on nuptials. He’s entitled to that, and if his fiances family can’t accept that, then I’d drop them like a bad habit and never look back. This needs to be resolved completely before they can move on.
It’s not odd to keep ATM receipts. That’s standard bookkeeping practice. Otherwise, “Did you use my card at 3PM on Thursday 2 weeks ago?” is a really hard question to answer.
Under ordinary circumstances not at all odd, but in conjunction with the McNugget thing and the grand theft, it raises suspicions.
What if the fiancée grew up with a black sheep sister who – among other things – committed actual crimes ?
Maybe our fiancée is consciously/unconsciously differentiating herself from the black sheep sister, and doing that Abe Lincoln thing with the extra McNugget for no malign reason.
I agree that this is a possibility, but if that’s the case, then we’ve established that the OP’s fiance knows that her sister is a problem - and that in and of itself would represent a huge credibility problem for the OP’s fiance.
If this is the case, the OP’s fiance has knowingly exposed him to danger - and not told him about it.
Oh, I see. It’s the “obsessive preoccupation with demonstrating her honesty” that “by itself would strike me as weird”, not the “meticulously keeps receipts of whenever she uses his ATM”. I didn’t parse it that way the first time.
Wow! A lot written over the past couple of hrs.
I agree w/ the folk who say your relations w/ the family and any legal actions are 2 separate issues. My PERSONAL approach would be to focus on the family issues first, and only address the legal actions if I felt there were good reasons to do so.
Like LSL said upthread, figure out what the extended family thinks. If ANY of them do anything other than flatly criticize the thief, you need to get clear w/ fiance how the 2 of you are going to handle that. People marry into all kinds of ugly family situations, but you ought to do so w/ your eyes wide open and with a plan and a commitment to support each other.
One aspect will be any hierarchy w/in the family. For example, if fiance’s mom is a strong family leader, and supports the thief, that will suggest a lot more potential strife than if a 2d cousin across the country supports her.
Re: legal issues, you’ll have to decide between pressing criminal charges and suing. In deciding whether to pursue either, I’d sit down w/ fiance and try to figure out how such actions fit in w/ your assessment of the family dynamics.
What would be your motivations for pressing charges/suing? To punish the thief? Because it is the right thing to do? To get your $ back? To protect society against a dangerous person? Realize that lawsuits are long and unpleasant. Weigh the costs - including family strife - against the potential benefits.
Good luck.