First love and family acceptance

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Hi this is going to be very long just to warn you there is a lot of back story. First of all i am 24 year old female that recently moved out of her moms house. I have a very loving mother that has had a terrible upbringing from abuse in all forms and rejection from her own mother. My mom has tried to give me everything that she never got from her mother and operates under that idea. She has been to many therapists to help her deal with many problems some of which were depression self-esteem issues and social anxiety's. She was introduced to relationships at a young age in a very rough way with at the age of fifteen having her first boyfriend and not even knowing what sex was or her own period as her mother was extremely neglectful. She continued on into her adult life having many abusive and negatively impacting relationships. She married my father after seven years of them being together despite her not wanting to marry him and wanting to break up. Later they got divorced, he was abusive to her and she was also abusive, they were completely different people. After the divorce she had about five different relationships all of them turning out badly and abusively in the end, the last of which led to me being affected in physical way, this i think is what has made her not want to date for 14 years.
Know the issue: I have been taught through watching my mother struggle with men many different things, caution, being true to yourself, and strength, i am a strong and independent woman and i know that this is due to my mothers mistakes and her triumphs and parenting. I began college feeling liberated happy to be away from the anxiety's of high school life and feeling confident and positive. I skipped the whole high school boyfriend thing as I always viewed it as silly and that I was to young to date. I met my now boyfriend the first term of college we were in two classes together English and music, we bonded over our violin music and quickly became friends. then after a year of being best friends I took the next step and asked him to be my boyfriend. We have been together for six years. He is my best friend and I am extremely happy when I am with him. The problem is my mother has never approved of the relationship since day one. I moved away with her to another state to go to a grad school and stayed in contact with him, now he is moving to this state to get his masters. This relationship is tearing my mother apart, she insists that the only way to know if he is the right one is for me to break up with him and meet other people, not date as she says or sleep around but meet other people. This doesn't make any sense to me as I meet people every day and I have many friends and have many interests from dancing to art to music to science I am independent and do whatever I want despite being in a relationship, this is something she is not accustomed to. She has never been in a relationship even close to the one I have and yet she claims that she can understand what it is like and thinks it is subjected to the same cliche variables that affect other relationships, but this is not entirely true we have a very unstereotypical relationship. Once I told her he was moving here she became furious and said I was a foolish little girl, now I don't know what to do she has always been a controlling mother motivated by love and protection but I can't go against what is right in my mind for this relationship and have no intentions of breaking it off. I don't think there is any concrete way of knowing if someone is "the one" relationships are always a risk no matter what and I have taken this relationship very slowly and stayed true to my dreams and so has he we have sacrificed nothing of what we wanted for ourselves. We have grown together as a team, as lovers, as best friends, and there is no way that I will throw that away on a chance of finding some fictional answer to an age old question. So how do I address the issue: I want to maintain a healthy and happy relationship with my mom, I don't want it to be a repeat of her mom and her, but I also cant in all consciousness and honor to myself do what she wants me to do.

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@dee1015,

dee1015 wrote:

I want to maintain a healthy and happy relationship with my mom,

it doesn't actually read as if you have a healthy relationship with your mother yet. have the two of you ever gone for counselling together?

I'm actually not sure I recommend it, but it may be the only way for her to stay out of your way in terms of maintaining your own healthy romantic relationship.

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@dee1015,

She does have a point, skewed by her past experiences though it may be.

One of the scenarios we see here a lot are people who get together early in their lives and then, years later, feel they missed out. This doesn't mean that everyone feels this way, or it's right or wrong, etc. But there is something to be said about having other experiences.

Beyond that, though, she is of course projecting her own experiences and insecurities onto you. You say she has been in therapy, but it doesn't seem to have stuck much. This just seems like her own personal anxieties. Note, I am neither a doctor, nor am I a therapist.

Ultimately, of course, this is your life. You are an adult, I assume your boyfriend is, and so you are both free to choose your lives. As one of our members here says, know which hill you want to die on. That is, pick your battles.

I would say that this is a big battle. I would say that this is a good hill to die on. But be prepared for the relationship with your mother to potentially die on this hill.

You can acknowledge her feelings and her concerns, and address what I mentioned above. Explain that you don't feel the need to sow some wild oats. You're happy and this is important to you. You're not going to go and deliberately sabotage this.

Say this when you are both calm, just sitting at the kitchen table.

And then gauge her reaction. She might respect you standing up for yourself. She might whine but ultimately be okay with it. She might try to passive-aggressively guilt you into doing what she wants. She might scream at you that you're making some horrible mistake. She might claim you are no longer her child. Any of those things could happen, or other things could.

But I think you need to have the discussion at some point. Be prepared for the worst, and recognize that you might not be able to have your love relationship with your boyfriend and a semi-normalized (it's not a normalized one by any means) relationship with your mother at the same time. But this is neither your fault, nor is it your boyfriend's. It's your mother's.

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@ehBeth,

You write very well, so this isn't exactly a complaint, but for reading on a2k, it's easier to digest a long post if there are clear paragraphs with a white space in between.

On your dilemma, I sympathize and wish you luck and wisdom on it. I agree with your points. I also agree with ehBeth, about not being there yet, in a relation with your mother, for a lot of reasons regarding her background and your different background and needs of both of you that are understandable.

I don't always think therapy fixes things, but in this situation, mother daughter therapy makes sense to me. How you work that out, I've no clue (my mother had alzheimers and any idea of therapeutic input was way too late), but others here may have suggestions on how you can make that happen. Or somehow work it out yourself between yourselves if it is more comfortable for both of you. I can understand therapy resistance.

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@jespah,

Jespah makes good sense to me too.

A story -
my first serious lover was - I still think so, many decades later - a very good and interesting person, from the bits I know about his later life. I was surprised when he asked me to go to a concert with him, so surprised that my contact lens, the old kind, fell to the inner edge of my eye and I had to squirm and dig it out. Anyway, in our short time, knowing him was an education for both of us. I must have had some interesting attributes, and he, he was a poet, top of class in chemistry, very well read, extremely knowledgeable about art and music and politics, and besides all that was funny and kind. Kind, not in a gooey way. Oh, and a mountain climber. I was crazy about him.
He was Jewish and an atheist. His parents had been communists back in the day. I was in the midst of catholic doubts, the doubts winning, before we were together.

His mother got into it, re my religion, telling him to watch out. We broke up a few times and one final one.

He married the woman after me, something like fifty years ago. We emailed at some point, when I saw some article about a book of his. The truth is, she was more right for him and I understood that, after grief, some time later. It was, though, an introduction to love that I wouldn't have missed.

What does this to do with you? Not much. I still think you need to make your own way and be clear about it. I guess I don't want the relationship with your mother to hinge on who and how you choose. Control is the question.

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