1. No “Chill Pill” for me
I was staying at girl friend’s parents house. First morning father was out feeding animals. Girl friend and her mother were getting breakfast ready. I saw GF put what I thought was an artificial sweetener into her father coffee. I ask if I could try one. She explained to me it was not a sweetener but a “chill pill.” They kept her father dosed. I decided right then I was not going to be part of this family.
noeljb
2. No babies!
I got rid of one serious boyfriend because every second person in his family had some sort of mental illness. There was borderline personality disorder, bipolar, clinical depression and his Dad seemed like a classic sociopath.
I did not want to breed with him basically.
BottledApple
3. Thanks a lot, mom
I intended to marry my ex, but after meeting his mom a few times I couldn’t do it.
She was extremely possessive of her son, and never smiled when I’m with them. I was the blame for her son not eating properly (I always cooked healthy food for him), sleeping properly (he worked 16 hours a day) dressed properly (I ironed his shirts for him when he was too busy to do it), any blame you can think of. She was also a single mom who has had two sons with two different ex-husbands, and had lots of drama with both. She wanted to retire at 45 but didn’t have a stable income, so my ex had to give her money every month so she can ‘retire’ and not work. All in all I couldn’t see myself dealing with the mom so I eventually broke it off before it was too late.
Tsuki18
4. Family crack night
I had just started dating this girl. She had a steady apprenticeship and she didn’t give off any kind of weird vibe. So I was shocked when I met her family and I found out they liked to get together and smoke crack.
At first I thought she was just making a weird joke when she told me about it, but her sister confirmed it the first time I met her by inviting me to the next one. The mum, who was in her forties, two daughters in their early 20’s, and the sister’s partner – 28 and unemployed- would get together and smoke crack. Their 15 year old brother would also attend but wasn’t allowed to do the crack, only weed.
That, along with multiple other things, made me get out of there fast.
Arcanistt
5. American citizen
He was my first boyfriend in high school and my last, meeting his family freaked me out so much that I swore off relationships until I graduated college.
I’m an American citizen but was living in Asia for a time. I started high school in one of those countries. Then I met him. One day, he invited me and our friends to his house for his birthday.
I met his parents and sister at the house, and while they were nice, they treated me with some weird reverence. Everyone in town knew I was an ‘Americana’ and knew I spoke mainly English. At one point they gave me a tour of their house, and his folks were pressuring me to go into my boyfriend’s bedroom alone with him. I said no.
They then began to talk amongst themselves. They failed to realize that I understood their language by then. Turns out that they were conspiring to get me locked in the room with their son, have their boy force sex on me, and then have the two of us marry. All this in the hopes of getting a green card for their kid and a ticket to migrate to America. Apparently my American citizenship was all they saw of me. I was 15.
I went from being that teenager anticipating her first kiss to breaking up with him the next Monday at school. Just knowing his parents were willing to ruin my life like that – nope, not having it.
esoldelulu
6. The bomb site
I was with her for 2 years and finally met her family. Her mother was an abusive heavily overweight single mother that scolded her constantly and put her down because she was an insecure wreck due to her own weight issues.
I also found out that she was living in their house and there were 9 cats living indoors that would urinate and defecate on the carpets.
It was never obvious because she was well kept but upon entering her room for the first time (she always came to my place) it was a bomb site and stunk of cat urine.
I met her father a day later and found he was an abusive alcoholic who also suffered from serious cleanliness problems… (a yard full of car parts, vehicle shells and rubbish bags full of decomposing rubbish)
Being a person that likes to maintain a clean home i just couldnt do it and when i tried to talk about it to her, pre breakup she lost it and accused me of using her and screamed at me for a solid few hours about how hard it is to iron and defluff clothing just so she could be around me; Months later she’s back to wearing cat piss stained clothing.
MirrorshieldOP
7. Super nice and elegant
His family was super nice and elegant and they all had high paying jobs, except for him. He said that he worked for his father’s property management company, which in reality meant that his dad does property management and gives his son money. He even started to pick up a ghettobilly type accent that none of this relatives had- I realized this was a bad sign.
Spaghatta111
8. Same name as his sister
His family was horrible to me, and he treated me so poorly while we were visiting (3 weeks solid because they lived in another country)
His mother constantly called me by his ex’s name (I have the SAME NAME as his sister, how is it possible to get that confused with another name which both starts with a complete different letter and is much longer than mine??)
His sister wouldn’t actually speak to me, or include me in any kind of conversation. Her partner was totally lovely and tried his best to include me, but the times that I spent with his sister/mother I was basically just the tag-along who was asked to hold the baby while they did things.
His dad wasn’t so bad all things considered but he made snide comments about my weight (which, yeah, is fair), family (who he’d never met), ‘lack of career aspirations’ (while I was financially supporting his a–hole of a son who was trying to make a go of a business at the time!) and was just generally a terrible human being.
He wouldn’t stick up for me or correct any of this and whenever I brought it up, would basically say I was imagining it. By the end of this trip we were sleeping in separate bedrooms and I broke up with him not long after.
Elevensevenone
9. She’s a menace
I married him anyway, but from the day I met his mom she hated me. She would rave about how much she adored his brother’s girlfriends, but hated me. I tried so hard, but she hated me. My husband is her favorite and she has an unhealthy attachment to him, so I think it’s not personal and more along the lines of no girl will ever be good enough for him in her eyes.
She’s a menace though. She once faked an severe panic attack to keep her son’s attention on her not me. The doctors at the hospital could see right through it though and knew she was faking. She called my husband the night before our wedding and told him if he married me he would be miserable for the rest of his life. When we went home for Christmas she tried to hook him up with her coworker/ Her married son. While I was right there.
We rescued a shelter dog and shortly after he broke a leg due to malnutrition in his neglectful home. She told everyone that I didn’t want to pay the vet bill and asked the vet to euthanize him. She laughed at me when she learned I was depressed. She told me I was being dramatic when I started crying after receiving news of my grandpa’s death.
She tells everyone that I come from a poor family and married my husband so I wouldn’t have to work. I don’t work right now because we just moved for his job. In reality my parents are wealthier than her. She tries to belittle me, but it honestly doesn’t bother me at all anymore. I laugh when she does and it really pisses her off.
My husband thinks he can play Switzerland until his mom’s hourglass empties.
Wanderluststricken
10. Stop touching me
This was after she met -my- family. She wouldn’t stop being extremely possessive of me around them (lots of kissing/inappropriate touching) then get mad when I (politely) asked her to stop. Then she lied several times. We’re talking being pregnant, not being pregnant, actually being pregnant, having an abortion, having cancer. Among others. But really, her meeting my family was the beginning of the end.
Ares8675309
11. You mean…no grandkids?
We weren’t at the ‘marry’ stage of things yet (gay marriage wasn’t legal back when this happened), but we had been dating for over a year and were considering moving in together.
Apparently my girlfriend had always used a gender-neutral nickname for my name any time she talked about me to her family and she never corrected them when they said ‘he’. But after a year of us dating, we were finally going to have a family dinner with them (she had already had dinner with my parents, and they loved her), and when I showed up her parents had a really sour look on their face. Apparently she hadn’t told them that I am a girl until about 2 hours before the dinner was supposed to happen.
Her parents weren’t actually homophobic, just severely disappointed that they wouldn’t be getting grandkids (girlfriend was an only-child), and that soured the mood of the dinner. Honestly, I’m sure they would have come around eventually. But that whole incident told me that my girlfriend wasn’t ready to be out of the closet yet (one of the discussions during dinner was ‘don’t tell grandma’y), and I wasn’t going to move in with someone just to be ‘the roommate’ to most of the people they know- I told her that I’d rather live by myself for now, and she got upset and we had a fight and ended up breaking up.
partofbreakfast
12. Extremely wealthy and extremely weird
This girl was completely amazing and my best friend in the world. I loved every second of being with her and we were talking marriage, until I met her parents.
Her parents were extremely wealthy and extremely weird. Her dad was a high strung workaholic who seemed to do anything he could to stay away from his family, be it traveling for work or training for marathons. But her mom… Jesus Christ. Obsessed with everything vegan and holistic, had a blatant hatred and distrust for anything artificial, especially medication. Extremely untrusting, and would flip from hot to cold on a dime. When she found out that the girl I was seeing, the ‘baby of the family’, and I were intimate, she began essentially bullying and shaming her for it.
She pressured her heavily to give (extremely personal and violating) details about our sex life, and then would flip her s–t when my girlfriend would cave and tell her. She found every possible excuse to shelter her and keep her as her little baby. Mind you, this was in college.
Eventually, her parents started doing things like dropping in on campus, calling her to make sure she wasn’t sleeping over at my place, and guilt tripping her to stay at home as much as possible to make sure that her 21 year old daughter wasn’t drinking or having sex with her longterm boyfriend. Her 3 older sisters were all free to do pretty much whatever, just not her.
I couldn’t take it anymore. We split. Didn’t see another choice. We literally couldn’t be together unless she wanted to cut her mom off, which I didn’t want her to have to do, and which she didn’t wanna do either, as it would mean being isolated from her family pretty much, which I would feel completely terrible about. We kept touch in secret for a while, and her mom continued to keep a death grip on her, telling her if she slept with a man before marriage again, she would literally be disowned. She had no problem with her other daughters having sex out of wedlock either. I couldn’t help but wonder ‘What is wrong with this woman?’ Eventually, my (then ex) told me:
Her mom was diagnosed as severely bipolar in the 80s, and refused to believe it, and decided that all doctors are liars and that medication is the devil, and refused to get any of the treatment she desperately needed. Glad I dodged the bullet of engaging with anything too long term with this girl- I thoroughly believe her mom would have literally murdered me if I ever proposed.
PCP-Papi
13. Daddy issues
I loved her completely. Her father was a successful businessman and self confessed narcissist. I tried to include him in venue selection and he threw adult tantrums at each venue and told me he would not allow us to get married unless we did so on his terms. My fiance wanted a surprise wedding at our engagement party which happened to be at their house. I tried to support this idea though I knew the red flags were there. The day before we told him our intentions. He yelled at us for an hour and told me how disappointed he was in us both and how he wouldn’t let us do it because there were people ‘he wanted to invite’ that weren’t there. The whole event triggered my anxiety and 6 months later after couples counselling our relationship fell apart.
pepperonipenetration
14. One shake of salt
My ex’s family was crazy (hence why he is my ex now). It was stressful, any time I went over they would force my ex to do an hour of math before we could go out or do anything.
They also tried to be super healthy, they ate fish twice a week and wouldn’t put salt on anything. They made home made soup one time, and it had no flavor in it whatsoever, so I asked for the salt and they all gave me this stare like I had just killed their dog, and proceeded to hand me the pepper. Like I don’t give a crap one shake of salt isn’t going to give me a heart attack!
[deleted]
15. Mr & Mrs Upper Middle Class
I used to work in central London and one sunny afternoon as I was patrolling along the Thames near Westminster a hen party asked for a photo with me. Afterwards one of them gave me her phone number (not the bride to be) and I followed it up.
She was lovely and my parents loved her. Her parents? Mr & Mrs Upper Middle Class who were dismayed that their (only) daughter was involved with a policeman.
When I proposed her parents gave an ultimatum to her. They would not pay and possibly not turn up to the wedding as ‘my type’ would be there.
I was up for throwing it all in and leaving my girlfriend as I’d had enough. Every time we’d been round to her parents I had to endure disapproving looks, comments, downright rudeness.
But my fianc was having none of it. We went to see them a week after the ultimatum and she literally said, ‘Mum, Dad, I love you both and this hurts so much, but you can both bug off. I’m marrying him and I don’t want you there or having any part of it.’ And she walked out, leaving me sitting on the sofa with my bone china tea cup staring at her parents who had gone into shock I think. I followed her out and we drove home.
They didn’t come to the wedding, but my parents were amazing – helping us with the cost and my Dad walked her down the aisle.
It was five years before my wife decided to contact her Mum after being ex-communicated. She was pregnant and wanted to give her Mum a chance. She kind of apologized, but they have been very distant, only seeing their (by now) three grandchildren at Christmas really and paying almost no interest. They moved some distance away ten years ago ‘to be near the coast’.
20 years later we’re still married, still rarely hear from the in-laws. It still hurts my wife, but as she says, it’s their choice.
Duncoppering
16. Kept them away
My husband successfully kept his entire family away from me until the week before the wedding, they all flew into town and descended upon us like carrier pigeons of evil directly from the gates of hell.
His sister told me our marriage would never be recognized by God because this was his second marriage. His parents lamented the entire time he was marrying a white girl, wipes tear, shakes head in disbelief…looks at me and sobs all over again- Yeah, we don’t talk.
[deleted]
Source
17. Insane Siblings
I met my exes family and I absolutely loved her mom. She was super sweet and funny and amazing but her siblings were total fuck ups. Her sister was 16 and with 2 kids from different dads of which both were in jail. She even tried getting me to bed with her. Her two brothers were 17/18 and both had girls pregnant and were in continuation school for being kicked out because of narcotics possession. I met some of her cousins who were nice but all drug dealers or alcoholics or trying to get me to bang them and I cut the shit when I found out multiple men in her family were registered sex offenders.
But she also took the cake because when it was spiraling down out of control I found out that:
My ex did the whole pregnant thing.
She did the whole abortion thing.
She did the “I am going to tell the police you raped me thing.”
As well as the “sneak into room and try to suck me off while I’m sleeping to get me to get back together with her” thing.
She also took inappropriate pictures of us and sent them to my new girlfriend way after we broke up telling her we were still doing things even though I was in vacation with my gf at the supposed time of infidelity.
Minister_Sassafrazz
18. Grandpa’s final days
I dated this girl for 2 years, She was cute, but a little off. As in, she would ‘cut herself’ superficially then talk about how much better she felt… Whatever, I was 19, and if you look past that, she was great.
She was very close to her grandfather, I had met him a few times before, Sweet guy. One day she gets the news that he’s dying, so we drive to see him off.
Meeting the rest of the family… this is where it gets fun.
Her mom, didn’t strike me as particularly crazy at first, but once I sat down to talk to her, she started getting overly sappy, talking about marriage, but ‘NO KIDS! Kids are the worst thing that can happen to you!’.. erm ok.
The aunt just wanted to argue with everyone about everything, and belittle her grown adult nieces and nephews.
Her sister was very obviously an escort (and not the expensive kind either) and almost always had some coke residue around the bottom ring of one nostril or the other.
Her brother offered me a slew of drugs while I was there. Much appreciated, but calm down man.
…..And as grandpa lay there, struggling to hold on to the last threads of life. He got to watch his entire family fall apart, mostly arguing over which of his possessions would go to who. There was also some rumors about grandpa sexually molesting family members, this made his bedside as well. It was probably the most messed up last days a person has ever experienced.
I left early, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Too much drama over a dying man. I had been contemplating how to break up with her the following few weeks after all that, when she started hanging out with her manager at work, and after work, getting rides home with him… and boning him- Good riddance.
Danr2442
19. Mother in law from hell
I married him anyway, but…as long as we’re talking about dodging bullets, I’ve got a good story about my mother in law.
When my husband and I were dating, his mother spent the better part of 1.5 years trying to convince him to dump me. I had done nothing to her whatsoever. When I would go visit, she would be nice to me in front of everyone, but then switch off and completely ignore me when no one else was around.
Fast forward to five years later: we’re married, but MIL is now divorced. She had an affair with -and then secretly got married to a man convicted of molesting his own child. She spent the better part of a year lying to us about why she wanted the divorce, that she was seeing someone, and then she tried to hide the man’s past from us, along with her secret marriage. She sees nothing wrong with her actions, and thinks her new husband is totally safe.
We’ve cut her out of our lives for the safety of our children, and for our own sanity.
Minister_Sassafrazz
20. Sometimes mothers know best….
My ex boyfriends mom told me to abort our daughter after we broke up. She said we weren’t ready, mature enough, prepared etc.
Only I had been married once before, for 8 years, and already had two children I was raising and a good mother to.
Turns out later when our daughter was 4 and I was moving she told me people asked her why he didn’t try to get custody and she told me what she told them “if it went to court I would tell the judge he doesn’t know what it means to be a dad and he could not handle raising her and she is being raised well by her mom”.
She wasn’t trying to save him from me and the tie he’d always have to me, she was trying to save her future grandchild from having him as a parent. So sad.
Coffeesnobaroo
21. Mama’s boy…
Intended to marry my ex, but after meeting his mom a few times I really couldn’t do it.
She was extremely possessive of her son, and never smiled when I’m with them. I was the blame for her son not eating properly (I always cooked healthy food for him), sleeping properly (he worked 16 hours a day) dressed properly (I ironed his shirts for him when he was too busy to do it), any blame you can think of. She was also a single mom who has had two sons with two different ex-husbands, and had lots of drama with both. She wanted to retire at 45 but didn’t have a stable income, so my ex had to give her money every month so she can “retire” and not work. All in all I couldn’t see myself dealing with the mom so I eventually broke it off before it was too late.
tsuki18
22. “Not like your dad”
One of my earliest relationships, great guy we had a lot in common enjoyed each others company etc., but one day his dad passed a remark about my dad that really upset me and I couldn’t respect him after that. Context: my dad after retiring the head of a company returned to finish the law degree he’d started 30 years ago. He was clearly doing it to pass his time, but the ex’s dad says to his son/my bf ‘if you don’t study now (we were in college) you’ll end you like him and have to study in your 60s’.
viralplant
23. “That is not my name…”
His family was horrible to me, and he treated me so poorly while we were visiting (3 weeks solid because they lived in another country)
His mother constantly called me by his ex’s name (I have the SAME NAME as his sister, how is it possible to get that confused with another name which both starts with a complete different letter and is much longer than mine??)
His sister wouldn’t actually speak to me, or include me in any kind of conversation. Her partner was totally lovely and tried his best to include me, but the times that I spent with his sister/mother I was basically just the tag-along who was asked to hold the baby while they did things.
His dad wasn’t so bad all things considered but he made snide comments about my weight (which, yeah, is fair), family (who he’d never met), ‘lack of career aspirations’ (while I was financially supporting his asshole of a son who was trying to make a go of a business at the time!) and was just generally a terrible human being.
He wouldn’t stick up for me or correct any of this and whenever I brought it up, would basically say I was imagining it. By the end of this trip we were sleeping in separate bedrooms and I broke up with him not long after.
elevensevenone
24. The overbearing mother
His mom was incredibly overbearing, and controlled what he could/couldn’t do by constant guilt tripping and made up stories. She would drape herself on him for ‘snuggles’ to the point where it was awkward (I have children of my own and I don’t clasp them to my chest and sigh about how wonderful they are when their friends are over) and she would make sly digs at me all the time; what I was wearing, how I looked, why we were going out, how much money was being spent on me (we always split everything 50/50 at my insistence btw) and just generally made me feel like shit.
He just took it. When I brought it up, he was just super passive and was like ‘she’s my mom, she’s just over protective’… he had a sister actually, who had left home but was clearly the favorite. Whenever she came home, he was forgotten and shrugged off to the point where it was actually mean. Again, I brought it up to him and he was all ‘she’s just excited to see her daughter…’. His dad was a very passive (albeit kind) man himself, who just seemed to roll with whatever his wife wanted and I guess my boyfriend learned that from him.
She was heading for classic MIL from hell territory. There was NO talking my boyfriend round, he batted my concerns and feelings on the matter away like they were nothing. I realised that would be our marriage, and I knew I couldn’t live that way. It obviously wasn’t the only reason I split from him, but it was a key issue.
I have no regrets. When we split, he VERY quickly started dating and then married a local girl. They were divorced within 2 years, and from what I could gather from mutual friends; his mother was pivotal in the failure.
kingjoffreysmum
25. Plot twist
It’s not exactly the reason, but it set us down that path. My longtime girlfriend was a little borderline crazy, little hints of it here and there, but she managed to hide it. I finally went home with her after we got engaged and her mom would sit in the back at the kitchen table with a little black and white TV playing solitaire, had no friends, complained constantly, isolated herself, and had little flashes or paranoia where the slightest thing was perceived as a major insult that would send her down day-long sulk sessions. She also looked kind of like my gf but did not age well and was pretty heavy. I saw the future. It clicked with me that this was what I was getting into, that my gf harbored all these same traits both physical and mental and was working super hard to hide it all. I decided that weekend I needed to break it off. Plot twist – as I worked up the courage over the next weeks she cancelled the wedding because she is a lesbian. Plot twist – I’m gay, she’s not.
greeperfi
26. They couldn’t deal with it
This will sound horrible but I met them and realized they would both likely be dead within 5 years (one had cancer, one was early 70s). Girlfriend was very clingy and I thought about having to support her emotionally through two deaths. I realized I couldn’t deal with that after just losing my own parents; I ended 1.5 year relationship about a month later.
logan111
27. No fighting please
My ex fiance’s brother lived across the country and I met him at Christmas for the first time. Guy shows up late and immediately picks a fight with his father who then proceeds to egg him on calling him a loser and a scumbag. Brother goes to the guest room and does some serious bong rips and drink a bottle of vodka. Comes out much happier and tells me that if I am going to keep fucking his sister he better see a ring on her hand in the next 2 months…he was intending to move back.
We broke up a few months later for several reasons but this did not help at all.
godbullseye
28. No green card for you
He wasn’t my fiance but he was my first bf in high school and my last. Meeting his family freaked me out so much that I swore off relationships until I graduated with a college degree.
Context: I’m an American citizen but was living in Asia for a time. I started high school in one of those countries. By junior year, I had my first boyfriend. One day, he invited me and our friends to his house for his birthday.
I met his parents and sister at the house, and while they were nice, they treated me with some weird reverence. Everyone in town knew I was an “Americana” and knew I spoke mainly English. At one point they gave me a tour of their house, and his folks were pressuring me to go into my boyfriend’s bedroom alone with him. I said no.
They then began to talk amongst themselves. But they failed to realize that I understood their language by then. Turns out that they were conspiring to get me locked in the room with their son, have their boy force sex on me, and then have the two of us marry. All this in the hopes of getting a green card for their kid and a ticket to migrate to America. Apparently my American citizenship was all they saw of me. I was only 15 at the time.
I went from being that teenager anticipating her first kiss to breaking up with him the next Monday at school. I didn’t even know if that’s how one gets a green card, but just knowing his parents were willing to ruin my life like that – nope, not having it.
esoldelulu
29. Obsessive and needy
Meeting his family was one of the last straws, and certainly brought up huge red flags. His father was incredibly abusive to him growing up. My bf was an only child that his father never wanted. His dad was obsessive and needy towards his mother, and basically wanted all her attention at all times, and was jealous of the child they had together. I could see some of these obsessive and needy tendencies in my bf, and I knew he didn’t want kids and I did. If we had kids, I was afraid he would react how his father had. Maybe not in an abusive way, but I was still worried. We ended up breaking up for other reasons, but this definitely influenced it.
Ineedanosehat
30. No controlling family
Didn’t notice until I broke up with him, but several family members shot up red flags: an overly attached sister, she always wanted to be around. Even in some of our dates. An ‘I can do it better than you’ cousin who always wanted to have the upper hand but always had my boyfriend make loans for him. But what really did it was one time we were at one of his niece’s birthday party. All of them basically circled around us and asked us when we’d marry. After this, he’d always bring the marriage issue up. That’s when it clicked I did not want to marry the guy. He was being controlled by his family.
black_kit_kat
31. When family matters
It wasn’t marriage but my ex-gf had a father that was the I was with a woman for 3 years. We got along great, had great sexual chemistry, had a lot in common, and generally had a good time together. I was not a fan of her family, however. They were a wreck. Divorced parents that didn’t get along, despite being divorced for years. Nobody in her family had their lives together in any positive way. A lot of unemployed, drug-using, overall mean people. I broke it off with her after 3 years because I knew I wanted to pursue a relationship with a woman I met (who is now my wife). I knew right away that things would work out with my wife because I loved her family right away. I never realized when I was with my ex how much family mattered in the relationship, but it did play a big part in my decision.
romafa