Help! My partner’s grown-up daughter can’t stand me
Solve your sex, love & life troubles
In theIr new column, tV’s Steph and Dom Parker, 51 and 53, draw on 20 years of marriage to solve your relationship problems...
QI MET my boyfriend seven years ago and we’ve been living together for the past three. I love him very much. The problem is his 22-year-old daughter. She doesn’t like me, but I suspect she wouldn’t like anyone her father was with. Despite the fact they split up before she was born, she still hopes her parents will get back together.
I’m always careful not to upset her, but last year I did unintentionally — and now she has cut all contact with me. She refuses to come to our house and only invites her father to hers.
Her father is desperate for us to make up and the whole thing is causing a huge rift between us. How can my partner and I repair our relationship?
STEPH SAYS:
This is a very serious matter for everyone and it’s not going to go away. The issue is the fact the daughter resents her father being with anyone other than her mother.
You’re not alone. This kind of thing happens all the time. People think adult children are easier to deal with than small ones in a second relationship, but actually they can be a lot worse. They have louder voices now!
You don’t say what happened when you upset her last year, but it doesn’t matter. She found a chink in your armour and it’s given her an excuse to hate you.
She needs to realise that Mum and Dad are not getting back together and your boyfriend needs to realise that he could be going out with Mother Teresa and his daughter would still be against it. But you have to solve this. It’s ruining your relationship and could end it.
My advice would be to send her a handwritten letter — not a text or an email (too impersonal) — inviting her to lunch (specify a time and place). You need to treat her as an adult in the hope it will get her to stop throwing her toys out of her pram.
Hopefully, she’ll turn up and then, again, you must treat her as an adult — she’s 22 for God’s sake!
Ask her to talk you through exactly what went wrong last year, point by point: ‘What did I do?’, ‘Why did it hurt?’ Then apologise. I assume you didn’t mean any harm. Tell her that!
You probably upset her without realising or maybe you lost your rag because you’d had enough — it can so easily happen. Invite the elephant into the room: it’s not going away.
If you don’t want to apologise then don’t, but you need to have a dialogue. Tell her you are not the devil, you are not to be feared — explain that you could, in fact, turn out to be a positive influence in her life.
Spell it out for her that you’re not here to hurt her, you’re here to help her. And ask her, straight out, why she doesn’t want you around. I believe in putting your problems on the table. Your boyfriend will adore you for trying, and hopefully she will finally see you as an equal.
In any case, you have to try. You have to do everything possible and you have to do it honestly. DOM SAYS: This is a tricky one. My immediate take is that this is not your problem. I know it might feel like it is, but it isn’t. This is between your boyfriend and his daughter. Your relationship with your partner is separate to his relationship with his daughter. It’s terribly sad she won’t accept you, but there isn’t a great deal you can do. You have to be as nice, kind, open and honest as you possibly can and hope she comes round eventually. The one thing you must not worry about is your boyfriend getting back together with her mother: after 20-odd years, there’s no chance of reconciliation. Here’s what you should do. Take a step back, tell your partner you love him dearly and that you’d never dream of making him choose between his daughter and you, that it’s fine to spend as much time as he wants with her, but that you will spend that time with your friends. Then, suggest he and his daughter have therapy. The problem is between them. In the full version of your letter, you mention your boyfriend carries a lot of guilt from the time he split. This is a dangerous feeling. Guilt is corrosive — he needs to deal with it. If your partner doesn’t want to ask his daughter to have therapy — or if she refuses — ask him to go alone. You must be supportive, but you can’t dissolve his guilt. Fundamentally, this is a matter of acceptance, but it’s his daughter who has to accept that her parents’ relationship is over and that you are part of her dad’s life. This is a very difficult situation and my heart goes out to you, but at 22, she’s an adult who will make up her own mind. What your partner needs to realise is that this is not about you — his daughter would be the same with another partner. So either he has to solve this problem, or he’s effectively choosing to remain single indefinitely. He’s being weak by letting his daughter hold him to ransom like this. He has to man up and tell her to accept he’s never getting back together with her mother, that he loves his girlfriend and that by refusing to accept the status quo she’s essentially asking her father to remain single for ever. Then you must stand back and be as supportive as you can — to both of them.