Dear Roe,
My boyfriend’s family are mostly based outside Ireland, so he doesn’t get to see them very often. Two of the other siblings don’t get on after a fight years ago, and so they are rarely all together as a family. They are all quite sensitive and quite judgmental. They expect a lot without saying what they want or need, and get upset when things don’t come through. There are many years of resentments built up.
Their mum is very focused on herself. She doesn’t listen to anybody properly, and doesn’t make efforts to meet her children’s psychological needs on any level. She also listens to right-wing media and has ungenerous opinions about immigrants and foreigners, people of colour and people who are in any way different or in need.
The reason I’m contacting you is my boyfriend seems to be going through a kind of a transition period, where he’s beginning to realise that his mum and brother are particularly selfish individuals. It’s hurtful to my boyfriend. I think this will carry forward and cause him a lot of pain, until he accepts them as they are and tries to just avoid certain topics.
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The problem is that he seems incapable of acceptance as a relationship tool. He has very few friends and finds it difficult to understand how I can associate with family and friends that think differently to me. I explain my approach that I never thought the same as my parents on outside issues, and I’ve been learning to avoid and accept certain things my whole life.
I have some friends and family members I love dearly who have varied views to me. I draw the line at bigots and high levels of hate and judgment, but I’m not going to lose a friend over a certain political party or belief. My boyfriend cannot understand this, and actively rails against this as a strategy. I love him and his values of equality and fairness, but I really wish he could have those beliefs and still have relationships at some level with people who don’t agree with him.
His life is made all the more difficult as a result. This comes up in our personal relationship too, in far less dramatic ways. He’s quite rigid, and always needs an explanation or a reason to change his mind about something quite small. How can he reach a theory or strategy of acceptance that doesn’t make him feel like he’s betraying himself and his family relationships? I worry if he can’t get there; I will find it hard to keep going as his rigidity worries me.
It’s clear that you love your boyfriend, and that you want him to have a support system around him so he can feel happy and secure. It’s all good intentions. However, I do need to point out the glaring irony in your letter: that amidst all the talk of accepting people as they are, of connecting over different views and ways of relating than you do, you seem to have a blind spot when it comes to your partner. There’s a very strong assumption here that you are right, that he is wrong, and that acceptance is something he must learn, rather than something you may also need to practise - not towards his family, but towards him.
It’s not your job to steer him toward any particular outcome, only to decide whether you can love and support him while he finds his own resolutions, whatever they may be
I feel for your boyfriend. Right now, he’s not simply reacting to difficult relatives or clashing values - he’s been doing that for years. What’s happening now is something far more complex and difficult, when dependence on the original family unit lessens, allowing individuals to see family members not just as sources of survival that demand blind loyalty, but as people who can cause pain.
This is often a time where emotional truths about family members stop being theoretical and start landing very viscerally. There’s a reason why many adults go to therapy, start unpacking their childhoods and family dynamics, and realise that there’s a lot of pain and damage there: it’s only when we have some distance from dynamics that we can see them clearly. And seeing them clearly can often hurt deeply.
Realising that a parent and/or sibling is self-absorbed, unreliable, cruel or emotionally absent is not an intellectual insight; it is a grief process. There’s a lot to move through: the grief over the ideal relationship that didn’t happen; the processing of pain and hurt that occurred within the relationship that did; and figuring out what kind, if any, relationship is now possible. This is all difficult, grief-filled work, and people rarely move through that grief neatly. They pass through anger, moral clarity, withdrawal, rigidity and despair before – sometimes – arriving at a quieter acceptance. I fear what you are trying to do to your boyfriend is rush him through this processing for your own comfort.
You want your boyfriend to be more open to his family because having a familial connection has been important in your life – but your circumstances are not his, his pain is not yours, and neither is his processing. You don’t get to control it, rush it or demand a particular outcome because you think it’s best.
There is a throughline in your letter of assuming that your way of relating – accommodating difference, compartmentalising relationships, and emotionally managing others – is the healthier or more evolved one. However, this approach is simply the one that allowed you to survive and maintain connection in your particular life circumstances. His circumstances and strategy has been different: he seeks alignment, coherence and integrity, because without those, his sense of safety collapses. To him, continuing relationships that violate core values does not feel tolerant or flexible; it feels dishonest, destabilising, and deeply painful. He is not rejecting nuance – he is defending himself against further emotional erosion.
What may help you both is separating three things that are currently tangled together. The first is his relationship with his family. That is his terrain. He gets to decide whether he maintains contact, limits it, withdraws, confronts or avoids; he knows how he needs to proceed in order to feel safe. Supporting him does not require agreeing with his choices – only recognising that this reckoning belongs to him.
You are not wrong to worry about a partnership in which every shift requires justification, or where flexibility feels morally suspect
The second is his internal process. You can acknowledge that he is in a painful, disorienting stage without needing him to arrive quickly at insight, balance or emotional fluency. His growth does not and should not adhere to your preferred timeline or outcome. It is not your job to steer him toward any particular outcome, only to decide whether you can love and support him while he finds his own resolutions, whatever they may be.
The third is what actually impacts your relationship. You are not wrong to worry about a partnership in which every shift requires justification, or where flexibility feels morally suspect. However, the work here does not lie in convincing him that your approach to people is superior, or that he needs to enact your desires within his other relationships. It is naming clearly what you need in order to feel safe and respected within the relationship itself, and seeing how he responds.
That keeps the focus where it belongs: not on fixing him, not on managing his family, and not on defending your own coping strategy as the correct one, but on whether the relationship can hold two different nervous systems, two different histories, and two different ways of surviving the world.
Acceptance, after all, is not only about learning to live with difficult people. Sometimes it is about learning to love someone whose path to peace does not look like yours, and deciding honestly whether you can walk beside it. Good luck.
