In a perfect world, all families would be close and very supportive of each other, but that is certainly not always the case.

What would you do if when your brother got married, he and his new wife distanced themselves from you and hardly ever talked to you at all?

That is what happened to the family in this story, but suddenly his new wife changed her tune, and now they want to be super close. Is the family wrong to push them away?

Let’s read the whole story.

My SIL suddenly expects me to act like her kids aunt and I refused. My brother is also trying to fix our relationship but I am not interested. AITA?

I 29F have 2 older brothers and this is going to be related to James 34M.

Sometime around 3 years ago James met his now wife Aria 33F and they got married the following year.

Aria also has 2 kids from her previous marriage but I’ll come back to it later.

It sounds like Aria had some issues she needed to work through, and she’s taking them out on the new family.

Ever since they started dating, Aria has been very clear about her boundaries when it comes to our family. She claimed her previous marriage was a disaster because her ex husband was a mommy’s boy, her ex MIL was very involved in their lives and she refused to have the same happen with James.

James, I assume, being in love with her and wanting to start a family basically agreed with everything so the result was him getting isolated from our family.

My parents were never crazy, my mom was never an evil type of MIL and this can be confirmed by my other brother’s wife who has an amazing relationship with mom.

To be honest we would have expected more from James, at least to defend us a little in front of his wife or try to keep a closer relationship with us. But he didn’t so we spoke to him once, voiced our concerns about her being a controlling nightmare and that was it.

We left him do whatever he wanted.

Not all families are very close.

Ever since Aria joined our family, our relationship with them is disgustingly sterile and fake. We only see them for certain events like Christmas, Easter and birthdays and everything that comes from them is so formal I guess.

I don’t know how to explain it but they never share anything with us. The only thing they talk to us is small talk like, how are you, how have you been blah blah but that’s it.

A recent example that comes to my mind is that my brother got a big promotion and somehow it slipped during a dinner we had. They never mentioned him getting that promotion, it was something like yeah now with my new role, my schedule changed a little bit.

I tried to make a joke and told him wow, good job keeping it a secret bro and Aria told me it was not a secret but they are a private family and don’t feel like disclosing financial information.

Like what, no one asked about finances or money.

Suddenly she wants to be close?

Aria’s sister recently passed away and now she suddenly expressed that my SIL and I should be more involved as her kids’ aunts.

I told her I am sorry for her loss but I only am an aunt to my other brother’s kids, not hers.

She told me this is wrong because we are family.

And I mentioned that I personally don’t consider her or her kids my family. She is my brother’s wife, her kids are my brother’s step kids but that’s it and honestly I barely consider James my family anymore since we are now only related by blood and nothing else. I am not going to take over a role that I don’t want for people who I barely know.

Apparently my words affected James who asked me if I mean what I said.

He is still family, but she doesn’t feel close to him anymore.

I told him yes, I mean it.

He asked me what can he do to make it better.

And I told him I don’t know, how do you fix 3 years of treating your siblings and parents like crap because of some strangers that entered your life in your 30s?

He claims he is willing to try for us to go back to how things were.

But I told him I am not interested. He can continue playing happy family with his wife and her kids, he doesn’t need me for it because I am not a clown to entertain his wife’s kids when she feels like it.

While I understand why she is doing this, I don’t think it is right. James is still family, even if he was a jerk for a while. He is making an effort to patch things up, and that should be encouraged.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit say about it.

This person went through something similar.

I think this commenter is right.

This is not wrong.

Sadly, this is true.

This is a good suggestion.

The world doesn’t revolve around one person.

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.