He Loves to Guilt Us
So the relationship between myself, my boyfriend, and his father is, uh, precariously cordial at this point.
My father-in-law uses the fact that he helps pay for my boyfriend’s truck, insurance, and phone bill to intimidate and guilt him into spending inordinate amounts of time “helping the family,” which is usually just a guise to get my boyfriend to spend time around him because he has zero friends of his own.
More notably, he tries to lasso us into babysitting his elementary school-aged daughter, AKA my boyfriend’s half-sister, who he has limited visitation with. He wants us to do this so that he can go on dates or attempt to go to the gym.
Afterward, he got upset at us—and the way he lashed out was devastating. He emptied out my boyfriend’s bank account. This was all because we did not swing by at the drop of a hat to babysit for him the day before our finals last December.
After that incident, we took several steps to distance ourselves from him. We got a new bank account that he doesn’t know about or have access to. I started a new higher-paying job and I let him know that my schedule is no longer open to random babysitting requests at the last minute.
This resulted in him being left high and dry several times when he wanted me to help him with his little one. For the most part, he pulled back after this and things were okay for a while.
I didn’t see the little one or my father-in-law until her birthday in May, and that was mainly because I actually wanted to see her. She can be a little brat, but I can’t deny that I do care about the little goof.
In June, though, we did agree to help him watch the little one in the mornings so that he could go to the gym, as he had her for the entire month.
He initially wanted us to do this for free, but I flat out said that this wasn’t an option, given the gas per week that we’d be paying for in order to help him out.
He agreed to fill up our tank once a week. We drive a truck, so this was actually a good deal for us. Plus, he also agreed to pay us $250 for our time each month.
At times, he took advantage of our generosity and wouldn’t return to the house until 2:00 in the afternoon, which was three hours past the previously agreed upon ending time.
However, the biggest benefit that my boyfriend got out of this was that his relationship with the little one has made significant progress. Her mom talks very badly about my boyfriend to her and it hurt him to have his little sister disdain him so blatantly.
But by the end of June, she was excited to see him daily and to hang out with him by going to the pool, playing video games together, biking, etc. During all of this, my father-in-law has been in a custody battle with his ex-wife, who is a major jerk for a variety of reasons.
He initially just wanted more time with the little one and tried to settle out of court, but that didn’t happen. So now they’ve been in and out of court on a constant basis for the last year or so at least.
They’re reaching the finale though, with temporary custody orders scheduled to be made in the next month or so. This brings us to what he did last night. He made the most nonsensical proposal to my boyfriend while I was at work.
Prior to my boyfriend moving out of his father’s house and moving in with me, he managed to hook his father up with a fellow college student to rent out the extra room in their house too for an extra $400 a month.
After my boyfriend left, the student continued to rent from my father-in-law and has been doing so for about a year. We’ll call that student “A.”
My boyfriend and I were initially renting a room from a friend, but we recently moved into an apartment very close to our college campus that has a ton of amenities and locational benefits that will help us save even more money.
We have two other roommates, but they’re seldom here and it’s been wonderful having our own place so far. Yesterday night, however, my father-in-law told my boyfriend that he was worried that his ex-wife would try to use the fact that A was still living in father-in-law’s house to keep him from getting more time with her.
His master plan was to ask us to take A’s place in his house for $400 a month, and then he would give A $500 to take our room in our new apartment.
Y’all. When my boyfriend told me about this, I had to stop myself from straight-up going off on the messenger. Never mind that I pay $200 more than A does a month for our apartment, so there’s no telling if A would even be willing to pay the extra money.
Not to mention the extra $500 wouldn’t do much for him in the long term. But that’s just the first problem.
On top of that, my father-in-law lives right off of a major road that has disgusting constant traffic, is further from our campus and my job and public transit, and has a much higher cost of living for groceries, gas, etc.
Even if I were comfortable moving into his house, which I’m not, we would not be saving any money because the extra gas and Lyft and Uber expenses would quickly eat through our entire budget.
On top of this, the bathroom attached to the room does not have a functional toilet. A uses the one downstairs, and my father-in-law has told A that if he wants the A/C lowered then he’d have to pay extra for it.
I can already tell you that I’d have to pay extra because the second floor gets unbearably hot during the summer, and I’m not going to sweat in my sleep every night.
So effectively, he’s asking us to pay him $500-ish a month to live under his rules. Now, the easiest thing to do in my humble opinion is to simply talk to A, explain the situation (which he already knows about to a good degree), and let him know that if the courts deem his presence an issue, he will be put on a 30-day notice to leave.
He rents month to month, and there is no signed lease. My boyfriend’s younger brother, who will also be attending our university, will be back from service training in the next few weeks, and he can stay in A’s room. Bam, problem solved.
However, my father-in-law doesn’t want to lose the $400 per month if he doesn’t have to by prematurely evicting A, hence spoiling his brilliant freaking workaround.
Despite my boyfriend trying to tell his dad that these ideas and schemes seem overly complicated, he refused to listen and instead asked if we could come over on Saturday morning to talk about it.
I am so ready to take him to task over all of this nonsense and let him know that not only is his plan convoluted and absurd, but that there is literally no net benefit for me or my boyfriend to go along with this.
Our entire life would be more expensive, more stressful, and more inconvenient. Trying to finish up our schooling while dealing with his incessant lectures and blatant time-wasting would not exactly be a walk in the park either.
We also highly suspect he’s pushing my boyfriend to do this because then he’ll have all his kids under the same roof again. And as I’ve stated before, this man has no friends, is lonely, and is obsessed with trying to force his idea of being a family onto his children.
He’s made multiple attempts and comments to my boyfriend about him moving back in, but each time my boyfriend shuts him down. He’s almost certainly not going to take our refusal well, but I really don’t care at this point.
I’m not your daughter and you don’t pay squat for me. I have zero obligation to put my own life into a more difficult position just to help you out, when you won’t even treat my boyfriend and me as adults with our own priorities and our own free will.
Wish me luck, everyone! Hopefully this meeting will put an end to this ridiculous saga once and for all. Story credit: Reddit / larniebarney