Our Siblings Are Dating and Live w/ Us!!
My situation is very complicated so I'll try to get to the point as quickly as possible. I apologize for the wordiness, but I think all of this is very relevant and at least an entertaining read for the drama that is my life. Ultimately, the current state of things has me certainly doubting if we should still get married. Here it is:
- My fiance and I have been together for over 3 years and engaged now for 9 months. We are both 30.
- For most of that time, we shared a house (rented from her mom – who lives somewhere else) with her brother (26) and his girlfriend. I did not want to get involved in this living situation, but agreed due to financial circumstances and helping her mom out by paying rent.
- Over a year ago her brother broke up with his girlfriend and one-week later began dating my sister (22). I was very unhappy with this because I was not a big fan of her brother and I didn't care for how he treated his previous girlfriend. My sister recently graduated college and immediately moved in with us. But prior to that time, she spent as much time at our house as she could.
- My fiance is very close with her brother and share pretty much everything, both good and bad. I’m not nearly as close with my sister. My sister shares a lot with my mom, and I do on occasion, so it causes a vicious game of telephone so anything you tell one person gets disseminated to everyone else and often mistranslated.
- My sister is a bad roommate and often causes a mess around the house. This drives my fiancé nuts and has been a key point of contention between all of us.
I could get more specific, but of course all signs point out that we should move out – a promise I made out loud if my sister ever moved in with us.
Believe it or not, here’s the complicated part:
• My fiancé went away for a cross-country trip with her mother for a month. During that time I lived the bachelor life and, I have to admit, I enjoyed myself. And, while she was away, we had several arguments over the phone over various things. With time to think about the state of our relationship and more time for anger and resentment from our fights to incubate than they would normally, I was genuinely beginning to doubt if we should get married – as a number of warning signs have appeared about our compatibility.
• So it came as a big surprise to me, after not seeing each other for a month and having some serious doubts of my own, that the first time we saw each other in a month wasn’t that celebratory. She confronted me with several issues she had with me (nothing I hadn’t heard before) – mainly my procrastination, wish-washiness, and carefree attitude. These things bothered her so much that she told me that she was breaking up with me. Given my doubts, I called her bluff and said maybe we should break up. Well she didn’t really mean what she said, and had meant it to be to scare some sense into me to clean up my act. This caught her off-guard and within a matter of minutes, after airing my grievances with her, she was being very sweet with me – which caught me off guard.
• Life went back to normal for 2 days (with our conversation unmentioned) until, after another incident of my sister making a mess in the house, she emphatically told me we needed to move out. I told her I wasn’t sure if we should move out together after the fight we had days before. More or less our same argument was rehashed, but I stood my ground that we needed to fix us before we moved out together.
• 2 days later all hell broke loose. While I was at work, her mother came over trying to settle up money my fiancé owed her from their cross-country adventure. This exploded into a massive fight with her mother that actually resulted in her mom slapping her and pulling her hair out – which I didn’t witness because I was at work, but my sister and her brother did. During the course of the fight, my fiancé yelled at her brother that she should tell my sister that he cheated on her while she was away on vacation (something I was not aware of but I found out when the fight was recounted to me by her). My sister was not within earshot to hear this, but I was not happy not only to hear that her brother did this, but my fiancé knew the whole time.
• The fight came to its dramatic conclusion during a tug of war over car keys when my fiancé was trying to just drive away to get away from the house. Her brother intervened and actually threw my fiancé to the ground. She drove away and waited in a nearby parking lot waiting for me to come home from work. I got the sobbing phone call when this was all recounted to me
• When I finally met her in the parking lot, I was doing my best to comfort her and calm her down – especially since she was now feeling very alienated from two people she was very close to – her mother and her brother. She was looking for every reassurance in the moment which I tried to give her, but I could not betray my recent feelings, and when she said that now we ABSOLUTELY needed to move out, I told her my mind hadn’t changed – especially in light of this blowout fight with her mother and her brother – that I wasn’t sure if we should move out together. She now felt alienated from three people which broke my heart to see how devastated she was, but I felt I needed to protect myself at the same time. Ultimately instead of me comforting her, it resulted in yet another yelling match. The night eventually ended with now a gigantic question mark on our future.
I am now at the one-week anniversary of this fight. Since that time, basically the same argument between us has been rehashed at least 3 times. I did look at a few apartments with her, but she knows I am, at this very moment, unwilling to commit to moving out with her. Her brother apologized to her that night, she hasn’t talked to her mom, we are still in the same living situation. At my request, we went to a couples therapist for the first time last night. The therapist, a little bit to my surprise, told us that we needed to move out together. But in that hour we didn’t even scratch the surface of our relationship dynamic (and I’m sure I didn’t in here).
So I feel stuck. Part of me (sometimes with 100% conviction) wants to leave, to put this craziness behind me and start a new life on my own. At the same time, I feel like I am abandoning her in perhaps the biggest moment of need in her life. I want to be there for her right now but I feel like I may be digging myself deeper into a hole that I won't be able to get out of. And essentially there is now a time limit to my decision to stay or leave because of the urgent need to move out. I agree that we need to leave this living situation – but the big question is together or apart.
I’m not looking for anyone to make this decision for me, but any outside input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your patient reading.
