I have a very strained relationship with my mother-in-law. She is controlling, self-obsessed and our relationship only survives because I bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut. My problem is that I observe my husband gradually becoming more and more like her – he can be manipulative, uninterested, childish (when challenged, or when I try to reason with him) and when I try to gently alert him to the fact the he sometimes behaves in a similar way to his mother (whose behaviour, he acknowledges, is unacceptable) he becomes defensive.
My great fear is that I won’t find a way to make clear to him my concerns about our relationship at this stage (we have been together for eight years, married for three) in a way that he will accept and understand, before we find ourselves falling apart.
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