Drama.
I said that I would only write about cheerful things but I am starting to wonder if someone has just put that old curse on me. 'May you live in 1nter3sting t1m3s'.

This isn't actually very interesting (or horrible), as such, but these last days have been a change from my normal life of pottering and moaning softly. I wrote months ago about how my older daughter was away travell1ng with her boyfriend and how, frankly, all of the rest of our family including my husband were bonded in not being able to stand him. This is unusual because my husband is rarely on the same wavelength as we are and also because the rest of us are practically ALWAYS on the same wavelength. I have never known a situation like this.

Even when one of us has had some friend that the others don't find specially congenial, the one of us has always agreed that they can see our point but there is some specific aspect of this person which makes them enjoy their company. Computer game expert; foreign film buff; obsessive shoe-shopper; vicious old gossip ... You get the picture. In this case we ALL find the boyfriend's presence agony ... and my daughter can see NOTHING wrong with him.

My children and I are really close and they have obviously turned into the brother and sisters that I longed for when I was a child. I am NOT a 'smothering' mother as you can tell from the fact that I live here a lot of the time and they live in the London flat. Where they have a separate floor with its own front door. I have killed myself all their lives to make sure, as far as I can, that they see each other as close friends because I missed that so much as an only child. And, considering their age differences and character differences, I was secretly really proud of how unusually well they got on. UNTIL NOW - BECAUSE OF HIM.

My daughter was travelling alone with him for six months under quite fraught and sometimes dangerous circumstances. We had prayed that his uninterrupted company would finally bore her into reality. BUT NO. Sadly, they met up with her best friend who happenend to have a boyfriend with such rampantly awful qualities that it drew the two of them closer together. When they returned he had to find a new flat and couldn't immediately - so stayed with her in the small upstairs flat for THREE MONTHS. He has just moved out.

Those three months have driven my son and middle daughter mad. My two daughters are now practically not on speaking terms and she has bonded EVEN MORE with him over my middle daughter's 'psych0' behaviour (caused totally reasonably by him being so irritating). He is also still spending several nights a week in our flat as his new one is miles away.

The evening before last things 'came to a head' and my middle daughter screamed at them over various things. My son, who had lurked silently at the edge, said that they were all totally accurate although the the force of her argument was marred by the high pitch and crying. Yesterday my older daughter rang on her mobile during a break from her yruJ S3rvice (not ideal timing) and said that due to this unreasonableness she was thinking of moving out and going to live with him. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

It is hard to explain why he is so annoying. It is not even exactly 'annoying'. He is 'leaden' and very, very dull. If you think of the words 'sparkling', 'fun', 'interesting', 'empathy', 'charm', 'amusing', 'always gets your jokes', 'knows the same books and films as you', 'tactful', 'social asset', 'pleasant to have around' .... and then think of their exact opposites. That might give you some idea. Imagine someone who inevitably moves slowly in front of you as you were about to do something quickly. It is sad that he is obviously a kind and decent person and not stupid but ..... that is not enough. And not only not enough - she would up until now have been the first to dismiss someone like this after just a couple of hours. She is really bright and very sharp and funny in a scarily perceptive way. So what has gone wrong?

The other two had begged me to 'speak to her' as they were too wet to confront her but they felt that the whole relationship had gone on long enough and they couldn't take it any more. I had actually 'spoken' before she went abroad and after stomping off and crying etc... she had surprisingly returned and said she could 'see where I was coming from' but surely I didn't want her to cancel her trip. Well, no .. So how could she have come home and somehow assumed that we didn't feel those things about him any longer? I haven't mentioned that huge numbers, if not all, of their closer friends also feel exactly the same. The words 'What is she thinking?' have been spoken many times.

So when she said she might move in with him it suddenly came pouring out. And she became very, very upset and defensive. And couldn't understand what I meant about him and wouldn't accept that 'everyone' saw him in the same way and longed for them to break up. And, horribly and madly, accused me of saying these things just because I 'wanted to hurt her' ... Oh dear.. You can't know how much of my life has been selflessly devoted to trying to make them happy.

If she married him our family and the closeness that I have worked for all these years would be totally shattered and my other children completely agree. They already refuse to stay here on the weekends that she has brought him. And, weirdly, we have all separately noticed that the more comfortable he seems to feel in their relationship, the more, in tiny ways, he seems like less of a 'nice' person and the less well he treats her. So eventually perhaps even his only two assets of niceness and decentness would be gone...

I have taken this stand now - and it had better not be alone - because I couldn't just let her drift on thinking happily that we had all come to accept him. Please, please let it make her stop to think ... Surely it's impossible that she could be right about him and what seems like everybody else in her world could be wrong?
- posted by Iris @ 5/19/2004 09:32:00 AM comment