When You Hate Your BF's Husband (Bit long and tedious)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

If I were sufficiently enraged right now, this would be in the Pit…there would be lots of profanity and outrage.

But I’m not really enraged anymore.

I’m just sad.

Their fifth anniversary is next month. They had a whirlwind 3 month romance wherein he moved into her apartment and proposed. They went to Vegas and tied the knot.

I’ve known her for 4 years. In those 4 years, we have become the kind of friends wherein nothing is held back, or saved for later, or unsaid. She is the only person who knows pretty much absolutely everything about me. Even the ugly/sad/petty/unspeakable stuff you normally don’t tell anybody at all, because you don’t want to be judged. The stuff that runs through your mind late at night before you fall asleep? I tell her all that, too. And it’s a two-way street.

And our arrangement/agreement/pact is that no matter what she says, or what I say, there is no judgement. Just support. Just an open mind. An open heart. A sounding board. Whatever. In other words, she is my safety zone, and I am hers.

So it drives me absolutely bananas that I CANNOT STAND HER HUSBAND. She makes all the money, so he has the freedom to “take a stand” and walk out of whatever job he has. He can do this because he knows that she will pick up the slack. He wants to start a business? She finances it, and she wakes up every morning to help him make it happen. He works 40 hours a week? She works 80. Because she’s doing the job that pays the bills, plus the job that makes his dream happen. Even when he’s working, she makes 80% of the money that keeps their household running.

And he treats her like shit. He screams at her that she isn’t worth shit. That he’d be better off without her. She apologizes for the way he treats her friends–including and especially me–because she knows it isn’t right, but she doesn’t have the guts to stand up for herself. He knows that I don’t like him, but I’ve never been anything but nice to him, because I don’t want to alienate her and put her in a situation where she has to choose between her husband and her friends. I don’t want to judge. I don’t want to be anything but supportive, because I want to think that she’s a smart girl who will make her life better, in her own time. More importantly, I want HER to think that.

I don’t want to be the friend who “takes a stand” against him, because then she might not have somewhere to vent, somewhere to hide, wherein she doesn’t feel judged. I want her to voice her opinion out loud, to me, because I feel like someday, she will hear herself, and she will take a stand all by herself.

I can’t fix her. I can’t fix him. I can’t make any of it better.

She knows that he and I don’t agree on most things. She has no idea that I absolutely despise him. I feel like, if she knew that, she wouldn’t have anywhere to go. And I think she very much needs somewhere to go…somebody to hear her out…somebody who reinforces the fact that the problem isn’t just hers. It’s his, too. If she knew how much I despise him, she wouldn’t feel comfortable with me as an outlet.

I don’t know how to solve or fix it. I can’t do anything but listen, and hope.

And it makes me very, very sad.

If you’ve been here, please give me some support?

2

You’ve already said it.

All you can do is change your inner-external dialog and reaction whenever you have to deal with him or listen about him. Indifference is the key. Changing the subject is vital.

Don’t give him free rent in your brain. He already has it in hers.

3

I can’t imagine caring how many hours my friend’s spouse works, or how disparate their income level is. Let me just say that many of the healthy marriages that I’ve witnessed, including ones where the woman is the main breadwinner (and there’s plenty of that where I work), have just one Type A personality in the mix. There’s rarely room in a good relationship for two high-powered, Type A, personalities.

So my first point is to realize what is your business and what is not. How they manage their money, or their respective careers, is NOYB. You say you’re not judgmental, so practice it.

As far as him treating her badly, that’s another story. But I think you’re doing exactly what a friend should do: Listen, provide support, and let her know that your door is always open. Maybe occasionally say something like, “It’s a shame that he treats you so disrespectfully because you don’t deserve it.” and be done with it. I agree that you should not let her know that you loathe him. That’ll just put her in defensive mode where she’ll feel the need to whitewash what she says or even defend him. You don’t want that.

At this point, her marriage has lasted longer than your friendship, so he’s winning the longevity battle. I don’t know the divorce stats, but my gut says that if it’s lasted 5 years, things are unlikely to change now. 5 years is certainly long enough for her to witness all aspects of his personality, including the warts, and she has no financial impediment forcing her to stay. Instead of continuing to hope that she’ll leave him, perhaps you should switch gears and move forward with the thought that she won’t. Try to look for the commonalities, the positive things about him. Surely there are some! And if you really can’t, then limit your interaction with him by making plans that don’t involve him. Fulfill the part of her that he can’t, and enjoy her for the unique, wonderful person she is.

Sometimes that’s the best you can do.

4

Oh. I thought this was going to be about hating your boyfriend’s husband.

5

PunditLisa’s advice is good.

I’ve had the same best friend for more than 30 years. For more than 20 of those years, she’s been married to a guy who I dislike, too (and I am not the only one). I’ve never liked the way he treats her, and yet they are still together, and I highly doubt they will ever part.

It’s easier for me to let this go and be supportive of her because she lives on the other side of the country and so I don’t need to be in his presence more than once every few years. You won’t have that advantage, but as PunditLisa said, you do have the choice of interacting with him as little as possible and just enjoying your friend’s company. Put him out of your mind as much as possible, and just remember you are there for her.

6

I thought that, too.

7

I don’t know about that. If she knows that these things are causing her best friend to be stressed out, unhappy or unhealthy, then it makes sense to care about it and to be a resource for her friend beyond being a sounding board for an endless litany of complaint without action.

For the better part of a decade I took the “it’s not my business, just be a ‘good friend’ and listen to her” route with my best friend and her husband. After she was finally able to get away from him, and I was able to share with her in honesty that I had problems with him from the day we met, she pointed out that her sister said the same thing, our other closest girlfriend as well. And if any one of us had ever stopped biting our tongues and stopped saying “I’m sorry sweetie, that sounds rough,” and had said “that’s unacceptable, you shouldn’t put up with that, you don’t have to to tolerate that,” it might’ve spared her several years of what she now recognizes was abuse.

Sometimes we need other people to make things their business. Sometimes we need to be the ones making things our business, and stepping in to offer to help the people we care about when they can’t make needed life changes on their own.

8

It sounds like you are doing everything you can. It’s painful when someone you like so much seems to have such bad judgment, but really, no one but the two people in a relationship (or three, or four, if it’s polyamorous!) can know what it’s really like, first hand. If he is a jerk to you, avoid being in his presence at all costs. If your friend asks why, explain yourself, but avoid badmouthing him too much. You have a right not to be treated badly – you didn’t enter into a relationship with him – but like you said, you don’t want to have to make her take sides. Encouraging her to be independent and bolstering her ego are excellent tactics.

*If *his douchiness escalates to abuse, you may have to tell her that you can’t continue the friendship. I know you feel like that would be failing her, especially if she’s been abandoned by other friends, but it may be necessary for your own mental health. As you seem to be doing already, let her know that you will always be there for her without saying ‘I told you so.’

9

IMHO, verbally bashing her IS abuse. She probably does think she isn’t worth shit. Verbal abuse is long-lasting. It’s hard to discard something you hear, especially when it occurs over a long period of time. Eventually, you believe it yourself.

Leaving him may be something she hasn’t thought of. If she has bought into his opinion that she is worthless, then who would want her besides him? He’s doing her a favor staying with her, no one else would do that. She may need to hear that she IS worth something and it would be ok for her to leave him.

But, it’s hard to advise over the 'net, so I’m not going to “should” on you. Follow your heart, is all I can suggest. And, as said previously, be there for her!

10

First, you are lying to yourself about the kind of relationship you have with your friend.

If you have this kind of friendship, you should tell her exactly what you think. If you don’t, you need to re-think what kind of relationship you have. or should have.

That’s as far as I’m willing to go in the advice arena on this subject, but I will second what someone else said. Verbal abuse IS abuse, and fuck the Type A and Type Whatever shit, no personality type gets a pass on abusing people.

11

Hey, I have disliked my sister’s husband for something approaching twenty years, for many reasons. That said and despite the fact that he frequently treats her like shit, I also see what she sees in him. This last took me about a decade to achieve. I disagree with her that it is worth the rest, but that’s not my call.

My sister and her husband both know what I don’t like about him. It’s okay, she isn’t wild about my husband either. And my brother in law and I have developed a sort of respectful relationship over the years which is unlikely to turn into liking as our values are too different. But he likes that I neither lie about my feelings about him nor do I treat him badly – I treat him as what he is, the husband of my sister and the father of my niece and godchild.

I do agree with PunditLisa that one alpha type per family is plenty of alpha. I also have to say that my experience is that in a relationship of more than three years’ duration, there are generally no good guys or bad guys to be found. What goes on inside a relationhip can be difficult to discern from outside of it. The fact is that she is getting something from the relationship or she would not be in it, expecially given that she is in the financially superior position. What she is getting from it may be sick as hell – or not, no way to tell from here.

But if you want to stay friends with her I think you have to let go of the hope that she will change in the way you want her to. People don’t do that very often in my own experience.

12

That’s a really tough one; like you said, you don’t want to push her away when you might be one of her last supporting people. On the other hand, you have to make sure you have helped her as much as you can as a good friend, by telling her everything she needs to know about how you feel about how her husband treats her. I think you have to look at your own conscience to make sure that you have done the best thing for your friend, whether it is telling her how you feel or not.

I agree with Boyo, too, that you are telling yourself some stories. Your relationship with your friend has boundaries, she knows that you judge her husband, and I’d bet money that her husband knows it too. I think being more honest about your friendship is the first step. The second step might be ensuring that your boundaries with her husband are firm; you can’t change how he treats her, or her reaction, but you can certainly not accept bad treatment for yourself. That can also be an example for her of how to react to bad treatment; you can say something to him like, “Please don’t talk to me like that. Your disrespect is not acceptable to me.” If your friendship with her ends because you reject him treating you badly, well, that is a pretty questionable friendship.

13

My BFF and I have been friends for more than 20 years. We’ve been through marriages, divorces, kids, deaths, you name it. And I can’t stand her husband, nor he me, and she knows it. I think he’s a lazy, abusive, cheating deadbeat junkie, and he thinks I’m a bitch. She has acknowledged, a couple of years after they met, that he and I are simply never going to like each other, and she has no desire to get in the middle of it. So he and I avoid each other. She and I talk on the phone when he isn’t around. Back when I lived close to her, we hung out when he was off with his buddies, which was pretty often.

When they do eventually split up, which I’m quite certain will happen, I’m going to have a hard time not being thrilled. But I’ll be there for her, and I’ll try to act appropriately sympathetic instead of dancing around the room. (But she knows me well enough to know that mentally, I’ll be doing my happy dance.)