Hi,
so my sister has been having this relationship that has been going on almost exclusively online, since they met just for a few hours three or four times in over 5 years. She is very secretive about him and doesn’t want to talk about him to anyone. She’s also very insecure and, when we (our mother and I) suggested that she’d be better off if she stopped talking to him and find someone in the real life, she said she’s afraid no one’s is going to love her so she likes this relationship. She also has a very hard time having friends, she only has two or three friends who don’t pay much attention to her and who she kinda hates, but can’t leave them since she’s afraid she’s not going to find any new friends. Anyway, he lives in the other part of the country, with his parents, and doesn’t want to let anyone in his family know about her since, he says, she’s from the North of the country. We’re from Europe so there’s prejudice between people from the North and South. However, he has a job and is old enough to move and live with her. She says he doesn’t even want her to come down since he’s afraid other people will see her and tell about her to his relatives or something else. Our mother says we should find a way to talk to him, even if it means breaking my sister’s trust (trick her into giving us his info) so we can speak to him. He is definitely not cat fishing her about his profession and the place where he lives, me and our mother researched him a bit. We are really worried that she’s living an unhealthy life and, since she’s so insecure she doesn’t even want therapy and is secretive with us about anything personal, we don’t know how to help her. Please, advise us.
Edit: they also text each other constantly, all the time, and she tells him about everything about her life and our family, this fact makes us worry even more.
tldr; my sister has had an almost online-only relationship for over 5 years with a 28m who keeps the relationship secret with his relatives and she is also secretive about this relationship with us, me and our mother. We don’t know how to help her.
Additional info and responses (also posted as a comment):
Thanks everyone for their replies, I have read all of them and am trying to figure this out. Since there are some things that aren’t clear, here’s some additional info.
First of all, we did talk to her multiple times. She gets very defensive and shuts down. Also, I should mention, our mother isn’t very calm, she’s too worried, and she sometimes lashes out at her because she’s hiding what might be a dangerous relationship by telling her that “he must come to you before you come to him” (she, our mother, doesn’t know that she, my sister, met this guy already multiple times). I tried talking to my sister calmly instead, but nothing works. When she shuts down, she replies “nothing” to every single question and there’s no way around that. She even hides her best friend’s phone number so we can’t ask THEM about anything.
She doesn’t want therapy since she thinks it’s just for crazy people, even though we told her it’s not true. She won’t listen to us and doesn’t believe she needs therapy. A therapist told us, rightly so, that we can’t force her so we can’t do anything about that until she realises herself that she needs it.
Sorry if I missed it, but why do you need to talk to this guy yourselves?
The reason we want to talk to HIM is because of the secrecy and lack of action from his part towards a life together. While their almost online-only relationship MIGHT be harmless, it’s clearly not: we see that she became really insecure, isolated and depressed because of it in these years, but before knowing about how serious this relationship was, we blamed this change of character on other things.
They obviously didnt know about it when she was 16. This whole post is about how it was basically a secret relationship until recently.
We did know about some kind of “friendship”, she called it that way when it was first starting out (she was still happy, hanging out with her friends and thinking about and having real life relationships). However, we realised it was serious and affecting her when we saw her, during the years, get secretive, defensive, depressed, untrusting, isolated and overall retreating within herself. It feels like this relationship ruined her and deprived her of her best years by making her also feel miserable.
She's comfortable with an unhealthy relationship because she's afraid it's the best she'll get.
This is what she replies when I suggest that she ends it with him since he doesn’t even try to be with her in real life. She feels the same about all of her friends, as I already said. She doesn’t like most of her friends but keeps hanging out with them because of that reason. She’s too insecure and isolated to find new ones.
Has he been suggesting the secrecy to allow him to isolate her further, is he pressuring her for online “sex” acts and potential blackmail material or acts signifying “commitment” or her proving herself to him, is he controlling and emotionally manipulative?
He might be and that’d be one of our worst fears coming true. She tells him so much about what she thinks, does and feels, she tells him also about everything about our family and our family business, which is ridiculous because she trusts him more than anyone else and she doesn’t even know him.
If this adult has been grooming this young woman for 5 years it's difficult to express just how potentially deep he is in her mindset.
That might be the reason why it’s so difficult to help her.
It's been 5 years; of the guy was going to do something bad to her he would have already.
I don’t agree. Emotional harm is as important, if not even more important, than physical harm.
Is he married and doesn't want anyone to know about anything?
Our mother’s fear is that. Mine is more about the psychological abuse since my sister is very compassionate and sometimes naive.
Catfishing is a real thing and if your sister doesn't want to confirm who this guy really is, you can probably help her do it.
I suggested this but he refuses and she listens to him, though she told me she trust his reasons so I don’t know how to behave.
Honestly, i kinda got groomed as well by an older woman, that was 11 years older than me, when i was ... 16-17? Not entirerly sure.
Lastly, thanks to Runningonwater2 for their story, it really helps me to know that I’m not crazy suspecting that this might be a manipulative relationship.
Then later on, i even stayed in our "relationship" when she hooked up with some dude in her town.
She told me that he might have cheated on her with some other girl or girls from his city, but that they, somehow, resolved it.
And if you guys didn't even know about him until not that long ago, anything could've happned to her.Anything. Like disappearing.
This thought gives me so much anxiety. I love her and never want something like that happen to her.
PS: it’s complicated so tldr isn’t enough to understand the situation.
Submitted November 27, 2018 at 08:28AM by NaiveOutlandishness https://ift.tt/2E1JAUb
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