My wife and I have been together for 2.5 years, living together 1.5 years and just eloped last week :) Wife has a complicated relationship with her family. They're WASP type people... into tennis at the country club and debutante balls. I'm her first lady relationship (and actually her 1st long relationship in general) . The gay thing was a shock for them and they've barely made progress accepting it 2.5 years later. We knew early on that this was going to be a long term thing so she's made a huge effort to include me in family gatherings from the beginning but was always shut down. She tried to make compromises when the relationship was new but we've been together long enough now that we want each other included in holidays/ family activities.
Every holiday, bday, etc we have to choose between putting up a fight for our relationship or just sending my wife on her own. When she fights and says that she wants to bring me, they just hold their ground and say we're codependent. This most recent Thanksgiving I was actually invited for the first time... but we were told that we'd have to pretend to just be roommates because some family members didn't know about the gay thing yet and apparently it would be very traumatic for them to learn on an occasion like thanksgiving. To be clear, we were engaged at the time so obviously weren't ok with acting like roommates!
Anyway, this all brings us to current time, a week before mother's day. My wife is so tired of their constant efforts to exclude me so decided to take charge of organizing mother's day brunch so that she can control who gets an invite (meaning I get one too!). Well her mom realized what was happening and now is pushing for them them to do a one on one brunch instead... I think in her mind this is probably an easy way to exclude me without having to explicitly say so. We're at a loss of how to handle all of this. Anybody have advice for handling family situations like this? I welcome both general advice and also advice about mother's day specifically. We don't want to "push our relationship in their faces" (as they say...) on a holiday like mother's day. At the same time, how long do we let this go on?
EDIT: I want to add that my wife doesn't generally give into their manipulation. She's been standing up to them and taken my side since the beginning. The result has been us spending our holidays without them... either alone or if we can travel across the country to my family then we do. There's been no progress after years of this though. I guess we thought after a year or two, they would realize that this is serious and make more of an effort.
TL;DR - After 2.5 years together, wife's family refuses to include me in family gatherings and holidays. We tired of their seeming lack of respect for our relationship but don't know how to best handle it.
Submitted May 05, 2019 at 03:16PM by proteins911 http://bit.ly/2JfCWvk
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