[cklasik]

Hi

I am getting concerned about the plans of my partner to invite her adult son (in his twenties, let's call him Arthur) to live with us for some time, like two months, 'to see how life can be lived until he becomes self-dependant').

At present, lives with his grandmother in a little town. His father does not care about him enough, so it is the mother that is taking responsibility.

There are a couple of problems with this plan.

There have been a lot of pathologies in Artur's life, like abandonement by his father, and both smoke pot, by the way. I have been quite proactive in sorting out my childhood nightmares throughout my adult life, but I am sure the presence of my partner's child in our life may trigger a lot of latent problems.

My partner likes drinking beer to relax after work; she hardly does it when I am the only company, but I am fairly sure she will do much more of it when Arthur is around.

The attitude of the two towards money is to spend it. Again, when the two come together, I am worried they will start behaving more irresponsibly, if only to ascertain they are not bound by my uncool attempts to dominate them. My partner and I have already been through this before: when she was spending more than allowed her to contribute to our common expenditures, my attempts to make her realise how this was a drain on my budget she took as trying to control her.

Bad jobs and no perspectives of the two for the future mean several things to me, most notably, that the first thing Artur will do is he will buy a car, which will affect how my partner will want to spend her free time. There are plenty of things to do during weekends when you have a car, but I believe our common budget is volatile for this kind of burden. This approach does affect our lifestyle, which now will be nudged by the presence of the car in the household.

I am afraid my partner's dissolution of her relationship with Arthur's father when the child was a baby may point to some problems that might recur - and change her thinking of me in an instant.

I am not to good with interpersonal relations myself. Bad with diplomacy and with making allies, with more people around, I struggle.

Finally, there are many reasons to believe that whereas my free thinking and professional successes are what my partner looks up to, she is at least equally attracted to a loser type of guy, having no perspectives but making the most of the present moment. My determination to

I guess, you have got an idea of my concerns by now. What my partner proposes is that an adult guy special to her whose life choices are much more to her liking (partying, prodigality) is going to join us in our home in a bizarre kind of relationship. This person will be getting a special kind of protection by her, and possibly by her friends.

At this stage, I tend to think it best to do I can to not allow the kid to visit us for longer than two weeks, whereas my partner says two months and means any time that is needed for her son to become self-dependent.

How does that look? How to speak about this with my partner? I am afraid trying to address some of the challenges has already shown that some of the topics (temporarily) change her beyond recognition making it impossible to come to an agreement and to.

Thank you.

[healingme4me]

Does he have a job lined up? How did he come to live with his grandmother?

It's appropriate to worry about a toxicity in a parent/child relationship entering the picture. And it seems acceptable to have concerns about bringing into your homelife an adult child.

[Minnow]

How about charging rent after the two week FREE visit. You can give it back to him if he shows responsibility and finds a place of his own following this experiment. This also prevents him from seeing this as a free pad and a party place.

Bottom line is you need to be on the same page with your partner. She's not helping him unless he's being challenged to be responsible in every way.

[cklasik]

Thanks both. Being with my partner on the same page is a problem in this particular case (and just a couple of others). It looks as if different, higher priorities overruled all of our spoken and unspoken agreements, and as if a cold and destructive, and otherwise latent persona took over in her, revealing disappointment and contempt dating back to her problems in childhood: the same accusations and demands expressed in an impatient, uncompromising way.

Her son is the only person in the presence of whom my partner has been repeatitively disloyal to me, even making sexually underpinned jokes or comments and persistently denying any link to me, refusing to acknowledge how I feel when this happens, and promoting his behaviour of this kind in a hardly concealed way.

I suppose the reason for all this may be how her relationship with her son's father gradually ended with the child was born. I wonder, if her behaviour towards her husband was anything near what she is doing to me, I would have left without ever looking back.

Unemployment might not be the highest risk because he has turned out to be a reliable, appreciated and committed worker in his first job, whis he has had for a long time now.

There are basically two ways to approach the situation:

1. Preventing it completely by undermining any attempts of the mother to bring her child - this would require a lot of manipulation - and its efficacy depends on how the son will handle his life: if he grows independent and starts a family, that will solve the problem, and I wonder how it would relapse then, because what is happening clearly points to some issues in my and my partner's relationship.

2. Allowing the kid to move in and try to use diplomacy and communication to solve problems as they arise. This may not work, though, because of the apparent lack of trust and a burden of past inflammations.

Looks like I need to choose to be street smart?