Dear Dr Robert,

I was googling for websites relating relation between husband and his mother and I discovered your website.

My problem is that I married a man 10 months ago, 2 months after we've met. He told me that his mother and sister and brother had a kind of schizophrenia and that his father was nearly absent from their like and that he hated him. He asked me to be with him and I said yes. We got married on Christmas and then started problems with his mom. He is so attached to her and he calls her every night. He wants to take her out all the time saying that he doesn't want her to age. She tried to interfere in our life but we stopped her. I had two big depressions and I invented a scenario that something was stolen from our house and that I needed support just to gain his love, then I told him that his mother and sister said bad words to me while they did not. I then told him that I lied. He took me to a therapist who said that I had all the right to think that way because my husband needs to be with me more than his family and know that he has his own house now. My husband takes care of his sister and brother and their family. I am pregnant now but he thinks of his nephew more than of his baby to come. Yesterday he put an ultimatum. It is either I take care of his mom, go visit her on a weekly basis, take her out and consider her as my own mom or else he would leave me. He does this often and goes to another room, locks it for the whole night. He already took off his wedding ring. He can become so cruel and mean to me.

I don't know how to handle the situation. I am suffering and I feel that this will not change ever. My husband wants to live for his mother then sister then brother then me and his home. He doesn't even have money but each time he has some he spend it on them. He bought them houses and now he is planning to buy them cars while our house is mortgaged. IS this normal and healthy for a marriage?

How can I continue?

My friends say I should be an actress and show him and his mom that I care a lot but where this will lead me?

I hope you could answer me soon.

Regards,

Hopeless Case!

Dear Hopeless Case--

I am sorry for your suffering. As you probably already know, your mistake was to marry a man whom you knew for only two months, which really means that you did not know him at all. My basic rule for clients who ask me about marriage is to wait for at least one whole circuit of the earth around the sun--to see a person in all four seasons--before even considering the idea of matrimony. And then, if marriage seems desirable and possible, I advise a further time--perhaps another year--of "getting to know you" before entering into such a serious commitment. Unfortunately, now that you have begun to see who and what it is that you have married, you find yourself pregnant. What a sad situation, or, as you said, what a hopeless case!

That said, I advise you to cut your losses. Now that you know what your husband is and how far his "love" for you goes, my recommendation is to be completely honest with yourself, and to consider seriously what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Be well.