QUESTION: I’ve always thought my partner’s relationship with his mother was too close.
But now we’ve moved nearer her, it’s unbearable for me. They discuss their sex lives, kiss on the lips and he runs to her for support if we have a row. He’s been watching mother and son pornography and harbours voyeuristic photos of her on his phone.
She doesn’t like me and always tries to belittle me when I visit. It feels like she is jealous of me and wants me out of the equation. I love him but I’m finding all this to be a turn-off. And I don’t know how to stop the pair of them ruining my relationship.
Yours sincerely,
Sheila
ANSWER: If anyone reads your letter to me and wonders where the dilemma is, I sympathise. I often get similar letters that baffle me, too. “My partner tore the head off our family kitten, pulled the phone out of the wall while he beat me up, had an affair with my best friend, but I still love him. What can I do?”
It's the “I love him” bit that is so confusing. Because how could anyone love someone who behaves so intolerably towards them?
How can you, in particular, bear to be with a man who clearly harbours sexual fantasies about his mother and won't take your side against a woman who hates you? What is there to love? Perhaps, when he's not getting up to all this with his mOm, he's a generous provider, a wonderful lover, an exemplary father, and is kindness itself whenever you are ill or low. But you don't mention any of this. So I don't understand how you can say you love him.
Perhaps you depend on him- a completely different thing. Perhaps you are frightened of leaving him - though obviously that would be the best thing to do, because he's not going to change. Perhaps he has threatened you with violence if you leave or perhaps you've got no friends or nowhere to go? But none of those constitute loving him.
One of the reasons mother and daughter-in-law relationships are often so fragile is because mothers and sons have been so close when they were growing up. There's been all that cuddling and breastfeeding, even, when small, sleeping together - a physical closeness that most children don't have quite so intensely with their fathers. That's why sons - and mothers - often feel they need to erect quite strong boundaries when the sons get older, to prevent the relationship becoming incestuous.
Sons often go through a stage in their development, during puberty, when they become suddenly private about everything, wanting to distance themselves from their mOms. They don't like seeing their mothers in revealing clothes. They don't like to be kissed in public - or private. They lock the door to the shower room and, afterwards, swathed in towels, race for their bedrooms to dress alone. Absolutely right.
But it seems as if your bloke hasn't gone through this stage. He's just become closer and closer to his mother, never cut his apron strings and never learnt to develop a new, adult, relationship with his mother. And his mother, instead of putting up boundaries herself, has gone along with it.
You'll have to tell your partner that either you move back to where you lived originally, when things weren't so intense, or that he comes to counselling with you if he wants to save your relationship.
Because, for you, this relationship is intolerable. While you do nothing, you're actually, in a passive way, almost condoning it. Get him to stop it. Or leave.
The Independent