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Boyfriend and his sister are too close for comfort
I’m 26 years old, my boyfriend is 28. We have been together for 2 years, recently we decided to make the big step of moving in together, he told me that his sister would move in too,she’s 17 about to be 18. At first I was fine with It bc in the other house they lived in before she was always in her room or she’d be with her dad who lives with his girlfriend. I also didn’t take the time to really think It through, i was just ready to get out of my toxic stepdads house. I’ve always known that my boyfriend and his sister are close, but I didn’t realize HOW close until I started living with them. I have noticed that they go into the bathroom with each other when one another showers or pees/poops. Private parts are covered when they do this, but still.. I find It odd. She cuddles with him on the couch and lays on his lap, anytime she hears his voice she comes out of her room and is always RIGHT there next to him. The only time my boyfriend and I get any privacy is when we’re back in our room and even then there’s only a thin wall separating us from his sister, so she can hear EVERYTHING. Even when my boyfriend takes me on dates he orders her something to go because he feels bad about leaving her at home. Don’t get me wrong, I love a man who is close with his family but they’re TOO close and it’s beginning to cause a lot of problems in our relationship. Another issue is he makes me pay half the rent, but she gets to live there for free. My boyfriends dad pays our electricity and water (he has a key and comes and goes sometimes) and my boyfriend considers that as her contribution to the house. She doesn’t work, anytime I bring up her getting a job It always starts an argument because she is still in highschool, but she’s out by 2pm, so she has time to get a part time job, so she can contribute to the house as well. She also doesn’t plan on working once she graduates, her dad told her as long as she studies she doesn’t need a job. I have been struggling with making money too through the pandemic, but to my boyfriend that doesn’t matter. I have to meet my half of the rent by the end of the month, which I have. I find ways to make money, but when I bring up her doing something too and us splitting the rent in thirds, it’s a huge argument. I told my boyfriend that if she can’t contribute or isn’t willing to work, she should live with her dad (they have a room for her at her dads)He shut me down immediately and we got in an argument about how he thinks I’m jealous of his sister, which isn’t the case at all. I just think if family is gonna be with us the finances should be split evenly. I have asked my boyfriend what his future plans are and if we’ll ever have a place of our own, he says in 10 years once this house is paid off we’ll get a home just the 2 of us.. in 10 years I will be 36, almost 40 years old. I don’t know if I can deal with this until then. He talks about marriage and kids with me one day, but I don’t wanna have kids with him until we are living by ourselves. Before I moved in I thought It would be a sense of independence and that our relationship would grow stronger, but it’s not. I feel trapped and like I’m losing my relationship because we can’t have any intimacy together in our home with his sister ALWAYS there between us. I can’t go back to my moms and I can’t afford a place on my own at the moment, so I’m stuck. I don’t know how else to go about this situation. Am I being unreasonable for wanting her to work and help out more? I wanna get how I feel across without my feelings being invalidated. I feel like the dad has put his kid on us and I don’t like that at all. HELP!!
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This will be your home, as much as your boyfriend's home. If you are uncomfortable in any way having his sister with you, stand your ground. She has other options. Your only other option would be not to move in with him. Good luck, I'm on your side! I wouldn't want her there, either.
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If you think this is bad wait until you marry the guy if you do. This will become even worse then and over time than it is now.
I don't think it's at all wrong to ask his kid sister to contribute what she can be it money, cooking or whatever and not have it be a free ride. She needs to learn responsibility and what it's like to live without mom, dad and brother.
They have coddled her all her life and are doing her no favours by continuing to do so when she's an adult in about a years time.
They have a close relationship which I get it comes with being siblings but he has no backbone to stand up to her and won't. If it leads to arguments make an ultimatum that things change or you're out. Even if your name is on the lease there may be a way out if you tell the landlord you're splitting.
One idea is to talk to her father about how boorish she's being and that she's contributing nothing and you both can't support her through Covid and beyond. Ask him to either employ her and get her to contribute something or ask that he take her back. This may piss your boyfriend off but it needs to happen.
Try talking to the kid alone by yourself when he's not there and level with her about being coddled, enabled and having to contribute and that her dad despite saying she'll never need a job is wrong as she has no plan B. Ask her to try harder and find a job and learn adult responsibility or consider moving out because it's not working.
As far as nudity goes they're siblings and likely have bathed as well as seen each others bits before that being in same bathroom and using shower or toilet at same time isn't a big deal to them but unusual to you. There's nothing wrong with it from their perspective but you should let them know it bothers you.
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There are not many people who are that comfortable that they can be in the bathroom same time and don't require privacy but it does exist. My husband and I are examples, and a couple I knew simply took the door off their bathroom as they never used it. There are some families like that. Nudist families have kids that grow up that way and find it normal. So thats all I have to say on the bathroom thing. But everything else you say sounds like the sister has a hero complex with him and looks up to him to for everything. People who practically worship another human being will try to copy them in everything. He may not have connected the dots and realize this. All he knows is how he feels when his sis acts as she does. It is the biggest compliment so whatever feels good, a person will look for more of it. This is probably why he buys food to take home to her.
When you say the house is yours and his...I assume you both signed a purchase or lease. that means with your name on it, you are expected to pay your part. You can't go back to before hand and not sign on.
Heres what I'd like to caution on: When a person loves someone and marries, the partners family becomes part of your family. If that other family is stable minded likeable people, then all is good. You aren't even married and what you want and like, you are not getting, but I'll bet you didn't think it out ahead. Did you sign papers for the house, knowing what the family was like? Something is wrong with the parents in how they raised their kids, or the kids are making bad decisions on their own. Sounds selfish to me, offloading the teen sis on you. If it was the plan before moving in, then you have learned a lesson and to make sure it doesn't happen again, you either stay and make enemies of the parents and possibly your bf or sis by speaking up, or suffer in silence. The hardest change like you've already been told by another, is to change your living situation and basically cut these people out of your life. I married at 20 and was too naive to know that your basic needs and wants needed to be laid out in the beginning with bf, after he still wanted to see you for repeat dates, like around the third time. I learned this later after a divorce. There are some things which if not present in the man you want to get to know, or if not present in his family and depending on where you;d fall on the totem pole in importance to him, you on top or his family more important...that was the time to hash things out and do some major discovering about him and his family. If a women wants kids, marries and then after a couple years says she's already to have kids and he says he never ever wants any, theres no compromise since theres no such thing as half a pregnancy and half and child. No matter how much you think the guy is great otherwise, anything like this would be a deal breaker. I made such a list when wanting to remarry after a divorce, to someone new of course. I had such a list. It helped weed out many nice guys who would not have been right because a few crucial things were missing. So its not all his and his familys fault. Same as me, I made the choice to marry, as you made the choice to live with him. If he is not willing to sell and you to go your own way without him, (I understand this is hard especially now) you may be stuck for a while.Since everyone has free will, even if it is to make bad or not the best decisions, you end up having to change and get past the free will of him, his sis and both parents, so you'd have to hope all four change who they are, so that what you are asking for you'd get. This is very unlikely. That is why it is much better to learn how to screen people ahead by laying it out for them, listing your criteria and whats important to you. It might sound hard nosed but I did it and now have a wonderful husband whereas I had a verbally abusive man before. I don't think you'd want to leave him, feeling love for him. However if you stay long enough in a bad situation as I did, you find that the love slowly starts to dissappear over time when experiencing lots of things you don't like or hate, especially if its affecting you. I have no idea what the best thing os advise here is, but this gives you more to think about. You're stuck or you leave. I had to make that hard decision once. But I left because the stress was affecting my health in a bad way.
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Hmmm. This is a deep and complex issue. I can't promise I'm an expert on this, but I will give my two sense, and some philosophical opinions. Feel free to not listen to me if I say something that feels wrong to you personally.
This relationship between the boyfriend and the sister is weird. You sense something's off, and potentially even wrong. There is definitely a dependency issue that your boyfriend may be feeding into, with his sister. She doesn't sound like an incredibly psychologically stable person. That is not her fault, and that needs to be looked at from, of course, a sympathetic lens, BUT BY PROFESSIONALS and her own family members, and not without an element of constructive criticism. By this, I mean, there is a difference between caring about someone and wanting them to live a healthier life, and improve, and just blindly accepting them saying they're 100 percent fine the way they are. The first one makes sense, the second one is causing more harm, when it comes to those who are not psychologically stable.
This sister problem, however, is 100 percent not your issue. You are right about that, and you are right to put your foot down. You speak from a place of clarity in how you assess the situation. It bothers you, it's unhealthy for you to be in this environment, and from what it seems, your boyfriend so far has not been able to really listen.
I don't have a super concrete plan, not knowing everything about your situation, but my one piece of advice is this: get out of that household. You can potentially still work on things with your boyfriend, but you will be more able to do that when you are in a healthier living environment, for yourself. If you have tried to tell your boyfriend where you are coming from but he doesn't understand and isn't being validating, you could number one: break up with him, or the second option, get space, get a better situation just for yourself, away from the stress this brother-sister relationship is causing. There, you can kind of have time to cool down and think over everything. It will also help you gain confidence in yourself.
Getting out is a better option than staying in a situation you don't feel comfortable with. Once you are out, you can better come up with strategies and take action for making your life the best one, and even potentially working with your boyfriend to improve things there. But if you stay in, it will feel less and less like a choice and more like a prison. You will begin to feel dis-empowered, and lose faith and trust in your self and the discomfort you are feeling. If you don't want this situation to become the new normal for perhaps a very long time in your life, then get out, even if you haven't thought absolutely everything through.
Get out even just for the short-term, for a break. Maybe start by staying at your parents or a friends for a few weeks, if those are viable options, though with Covid I get that may be difficult. But you must find a way to find your own space. There, you can look at whether this relationship in general is able to give you what you need, what you can do to improve it, and also what you are able to take and what you just can't settle with.
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