Throwaway, because she uses Reddit, but not here, I believe.
My wife is fantastic- she's smart, funny, kind, hardworking. She's my lover and my best friend, and asking her for a date was the best thing I've ever done in my life.
She is the primary breadwinner in our family. I make a decent living, but she makes twice as much as I do. When we first got serious, she took over our finances, put me on a strict budget to pay of my credit card debt and start to save money. She does our taxes, she invests our funds, she makes sure the mortgage is paid on time and the cat has his shots.
Because of her income and her planning, we have a sizable savings account, equity in our home, and a level of luxury that I wouldn't have been able to have on my own. She attributes her success to some hard work, some luck and a bunch of white privilege.
I come from an upper middle class family, and I'm the first to admit that I lack the motivation and long term planning skills that she has (obviously). My family is super close- she's on a gardening club with my mom, my dad and I watch sports together, she has lunch with my cousin every few weeks. It's unlikely that week goes by that one of us does not see a member of my family.
Her family is.. not great. They are much more rural than we are, and in a much lower social- economic class. We see them for our nieces and nephew's birthdays and for major holidays. There is a lot of distrust and pent up resentment in her family. There's some drug use/alcoholism, some theft and abuse between members.
Here's the issue: While we aren't the type to brag about our lifestyle, she actively downplays the amount of money she makes and the life that we live. She travels domestically and internationally for work, and we travel internationally for vacation at least once a year. She always tells her family that she's going for work and got a "cheap ticket" for me to come along. She downplays the price of gifts that she gives to her family, and agrees when they talk about "struggling".
Her father makes jokes about me "working to support her", and how she should "cook better". Her brothers have both made similar jokes about how I shouldn't "let her" buy things. She generally ignores this, but it makes me furious to hear my wife- my feisty, feminist wife, put down like this.
We went to see her family this weekend, and we've just bought a new refrigerator, and her father made a pretty gross joke about me "letting her" get a nice one. We had old appliances when we bought our house, and she made us put money aside each month in a "when stuff breaks" fund. I wouldn't have thought about that.
I was furious, and had to leave the room to cool down. We got into a fight about it when we got home. She immediately opened a bottle of wine and said "so glad that's over for the next few months", and I told her how upset it makes me, and she was furious- she told me that I needed to stay out of this. These are people she sees out of duty, and I "have no idea how jealous [she] is of [my] family, where people actually LIKE each other".
She has totally normalized this behavior. To her, these people are just a cross she has to bear- she has given up on changing or working with any of them. She's also told me that she doesn't want to have to say no to a "Loan" from her sister in law, who has a habit of begging family members for money, and she uses her status as "the little sister" to avoid that. I have no idea how to help her with this.
TL;DR My wife's family doesn't appreciate her, and it infuriates me to see them treating her badly.
Submitted January 16, 2017 at 11:32PM by Randomuser13341342 http://ift.tt/2iuBglI relationships
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