@anita did you post on reddit?

@anita. @VJ …I need your  wisdom, urgently can you message me privately.

@anita – I don’t want to lead you on just my side of story so I am trying to present only facts and remain objective but your comments do mirror a lot what my wife also thinks.

My wife is dutiful to me and has made me a better man and made a great family environment for our children where they flourish. My wife has a close circle of friends who respect her greatly, I respect her greatly, her own family respect her greatly it just seems to be my own blood family that has this hostility towards her.

When we were living with my parents, I didn’t detect the hostility as I should have, I was a new father, husband and working trying to build a career. Men are not as perceptive to these things as women so it came as a shock to me the first time these issues blew up and the resentments showed themselves and maybe I didn’t do enough to protect my wife at the time, which I regret. I do recall raising my voice to both sisters on separate occasions when they were making complaints to me and my parents, the complaints seemed to be always returning to the behaviour of my wife and myself to my parents and how disrespectful we were to them or so they believed, something my mother did not seem to do much to dispel at the time, although my father did tell them to stop their behaviour.

There is in our culture, a belief that the blood family comes first and the wife is secondary, the daughter in-law is not given the same value as the son in-law. That is not a view I take. I believe all people have their place and their rights and all are to be respected.

This cultural aspect however plays me into a guilt trap. I feel tremendously guilty if I don’t maintain relationships with my blood family but at the same time I can’t agree to their conditions.  So I am in this dilemma. On the one hand the guilt of not visiting family on my own on the other the injustice towards my wife if I do so.

On my part I have said to my parents, all family are welcome in my house as long as the comments are slurs are to be buried where they belong, in the past. However,  I can’t continue relations of visiting people under conditions which exclude my wife.

It has been 8 months since I last visited my sister which was the time the slurs were made to my wife. The only regular contact I have now is with my mother whose latest advice was to go and visit my sisters and sort things out, but I know they are not going to change their position, they are adamant they want my wife excluded from the blood family. I think my sister after making those slurs when we were guests in her house is now too embarrassed and cowardly to apologise and it is easier for her to entrench her position and reinforce her belief my wife is ‘evil’ and she should be excluded from the family, the other sister with her opinionated spouse seems too willing to follow suit.

The more I think about it, I don’t think the issue is with my wife, I think it is with me and I have more enemies within the family then I thought. Spouses who feel they have been slighted or are envious. It is interesting that one of my sisters spouses questioned my right to live ‘free’ and how he had to pay his own mortgage in his own house, maybe the whispering of envy in their ears added fuel to their already burning fires. I am not sure, and don’t want to go down the slippery road of suspicion and paranoia, wondering and trying to figure out everyones agenda’s.

What can I do to find peace or  I am just being naive and it is simply not possible in this circumstance? Should I just let it go, let the years drift by, visit my parents, make peace with my guilt and focus on my own wife and children?

Anita, thank you for your reply.  Your advice is helpful in as far as it affirms that I am not unreasonable to have taken the position I have to protect my wife.

I am however from an Italian culture and here in Italy the blood family is considered very important. I would like to find a way to get past this issue, the current situation is not tolerable for me or my parents who could do without the stress of this situation at their age.

If my blood family is refusing to back down that leaves me in exile. Time may be a healer but as time goes on people are becoming more entrenched in their positions and it could be many years before healing takes place. The children who used to mix, no longer see each other and the pressure on me grows day by day.

My sisters clearly have a deep projected hatred for my wife, the depth of which I find hard to understand, maybe it is unjust anger and/or jealousy, whatever it maybe, how to get past it escapes me. The cause of it is complex and certainly my sisters respective spouses don’t seem to have made any move to reach out towards a solution either, do they also hate my wife or is it me they hate and hope to punish for some act of injustice they perceive that I may have subjected on them?

This act of exclusion of my wife is one of humiliation and ultimate disrespect and something I deplore so much to have been subjected to that I feel repulsed at the thought of seeking reconciliation with those that would deploy such an action. But for the sake of my parents and my own soul, reconciliation I must find.

Agreeing to their terms would be giving in to injustice, not agreeing continues a situation that only magnifies as time goes on and it may go on for many years by which time any thoughts of reconciliation will not even be entertained and the years in which families should have shared experiences will be nothing but vacant spaces in photo albums.

I ask again where do I go from here?