When you fall in love with someone, their family often isn’t a consideration.

And sometimes you’re lucky: your significant other comes from a wonderful – or at least well-meaning and unobtrusive – family.

However, there’s always the possibility that the family that come with your loved one could be a little more complicated.

And learning how to navigate that can be quite the adjustment.

For the woman in this story, bonding with her boyfriend’s family is proving to be quite the struggle.

And there’s one person in particular to blame.

Read on to find out how this girl’s future mother-in-law is has her relationship on the rocks.

AITA for wanting less interaction with my future MIL?

I (29F) have been with my boyfriend (31M) for a few years now.

We live together and talk candidly about our plans to spend life together.

I’ve never been with someone who makes me feel so safe and so loved.

The problem is my relationship with his parents.

Specifically his mother, Diane.

Uh-oh. Let’s see where this mother-in-law drama started.

I find Diane incredibly overbearing.

Being around or speaking with her for extended periods feels like a chore: like conversing with a 10 year-old who needs to control the subject and pace of conversation.

One-on-one, she is prone to 20-30 minute monologues.

She’ll use questions as a jumping-off point to share her own stories or irrelevant details, and will cut me off if I try to change the subject or to speak longer than a minute.

During our first in-person visit, she spent an hour giving me an unsolicited tour of her favorite videos and showing me the Facebook pages she manages – it felt like a girl showing off a collection/doing show-and-tell.

If I made offhand remarks or asked off-topic questions, I would get cut off and redirected to what she wanted me to listen to or discuss.

Yikes! Read on to find out how this behavior escalated.

In group contexts, Diane will resist when people like my boyfriend or her husband remind her to give others a turn.

If people naturally break off to make side remarks or have side conversation, she’ll often stop talking or ask people to ‘come back’ to the ‘main conversation’ and share what they were talking about.

She’ll also tell people not to interject/prevent others from changing topic if she’s not done discussing.

I find all of this incredibly draining, but have had enough interactions with her to accept that this is just who she is.

She genuinely doesn’t mean anything ill by it, and that the best I can do is to be generous and accepting of her.

To coexist/feign engagement without forming a deeper emotional bond than necessary.

And this just kept getting worse.

Unfortunately, though, Diane is also interfering with the relationship I have with my boyfriend’s father, Frank, who I genuinely love being with.

We’ve formed a genuine friendship.

My boyfriend is delighted by this, but has relayed that Diane has been feeling left out when she sees me talking with Frank.

She’s even requested I speak with her for a few minutes by phone/Zoom whenever I happen to interact with my boyfriend’s dad for even a few minutes.

(if, e.g., my boyfriend calls home and Frank and I happen to overlap via speakerphone).

So she tried to manage the situation.

The solution I’ve arrived at is to limit time generally with both Frank and Diane, to preserve my own sanity/sense of agency.

But this has become a point of tension in my and my boyfriend’s relationship.

He has repeatedly expressed how he has dreamed of a partner who is deeply integrated with his family.

And while he agrees with everything I feel about Diane, he’s explained that her tendency to control conversation or to feel left out are connected to her BPD.

She’s struggled all her life to form friendships, including with her siblings, who avoid interacting with her.

AITA?

It’s clear that for a long time this woman has made an effort with her mother-in-law.

Unfortunately, the two just don’t see eye-to-eye.

Her boyfriend needs to decide if this is a dealbreaker.

Let’s see what Reddit thought about this.

This person empathized and agreed that she’d done her best.

While this person gave some supportive but clear advice.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pointed out that the expectation should not be on the girlfriend.

If it was just this girlfriend who couldn’t stand her mother-in-law, that would be one thing.

But knowing that people struggle with his mother generally, this woman’s boyfriend needs to cut her a little more slack and perhaps modify his expectations.

She’s trying her best.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.