My partner and I have been living together for the past two years and knew each other for several years before that. We are both middle-aged with grown children from previous marriages, but he won’t introduce me to any of his family, friends or work colleagues. When I have told him how humiliated, hurt and angry I feel he says that I’m going to have to suck it up – because his family blames him entirely for the breakup of his former marriage, and if I came on the scene I would just make things worse for him. Am I being silly?
If you had written that you had been together for only a few months, I would have told you not to worry and just to take your time. Likewise, if you said that you didn’t live together and that you only see each other occasional nights to, ahem, “catch up”. The choice to cohabit implies a common desire to share a life, assuming that you aren’t simply trying to save on rent. But you are not sharing a life. You are sharing part of a life, a sliver of a life.
Think about what is most important to you. For most people it is family, friends, work – not necessarily in that order, but in some configuration. He is cutting you out of the three most significant parts of his life and in so doing has turned you into a secret. Avoiding conflict with his family may seem like a good idea in the short run (I don’t even know his excuse for hiding you from his friends and work colleagues), but in the long run it is bound to create more confusion and anger once they find out about the deception. And the truth always comes out eventually.
If his kids are grown, then they are old enough to deal with their father in a relationship. He might have been primarily at fault in the dissolution of his marriage (maybe his tendency to keep secrets had something to do with it) but really, marriages never fail unilaterally. There were two people involved and it’s always more complicated than it looks from the outside. Anyway, everyone deserves another chance at happiness, hopefully after having learned something of our personal failures and trying our best to get it right the next time. Or at the very least, making different mistakes.
Trust me, if this is a relationship you want to continue and grow, this is a boat that needs to be rocked. Hard.
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