Reddit is the place where people get the best advice when they find themselves in situations they have a hard time handling, so getting unbiased strangers’ outlook can truly come in handy.
A woman, 32, took to the social forum to share her story and ask if she had done the right thing when she decided to confront her husband about something that bothered her for a long time.
Namely, she and her husband, 35, have been married for three years, a period during which his family has been having regular dinners once a month. The thing is that while her brothers-in-law’s girlfriends are always invited, she’s sometimes asked to skip the dinner and stay home instead.
The last time she was asked “to sit this one out” by her husband, she agreed but made a reservation at the same restaurant without his knowledge.
When he left the house and headed towards the restaurant, she waited for around 15 minutes and went there by herself.
Once at the place, she sat at her table and ordered her favorite food. Her husband and his family were unaware of her presence until she went to the restroom and passed right by their table.
When her husband spotted her, he asked her what she was doing there, to which she replied that she was craving a steak and decided to treat herself with a nice dinner. Her mother-in-law dubbed her action rude.
The woman didn’t pay much attention to their words and got back to her table, finished her meal, and headed home.
When her husband arrived home shortly after, he started calling her names, claiming she was utterly disrespectful. The woman, however, demanded to know why she was regularly excluded from the family dinners when his brothers’ girlfriends were always welcome.
He refused to answer, but she wasn’t done getting to the bottom of the problem.
After a couple of days, the woman posted an update on Reddit thanking everyone who took their time to read her post and react to it. Most of the fellow Redditors wrote that what she did was right and encouraged her to get the answers she was looking for.
In her update, the woman explained that she pushed her husband into telling her what was really going on. He cracked under the pressure she placed on him and confessed that it was his mother who didn’t want her at those dinners.
It turned out that his mother believed the woman didn’t fit in with the family. When she asked him if she didn’t fit because of her race – she is half-Black – her husband denied the race was the issue. However, the hesitation in his voice said otherwise.
The woman kept asking, and her husband snapped and told her that his mother harbored resentment towards the woman’s race, her personality, her political beliefs, and past decisions, such as the one to spend Christmas with her husband and her own family on the first year they married.
The mother-in-law believed her son deserved someone better; someone who was more “like him.”
This revelation was a hurtful one, so the woman asked her husband if he needed some space from her, but even before he got to answer, she went to the bedroom and started packing her belongings. She spent the next couple of days at her sister’s place and hadn’t contacted him during that time.
In her second update, she wrote that she’s still considering her choices and doesn’t know if she would get back to her husband, but thanked everyone for their love and support.
One person wrote that when her brothers-in-law’s girlfriends ask why she and her husband are not together (at the time being), she should tell them the truth so that they know what kind of a person their future mother-in-law is.
Everyone agreed that the woman deserved someone who would stand up for her, not someone whose mother’s opinion is more important than his own wife.
What are your thoughts on this?
