[Anonymous]

Dear April,

I was born and raised in a very conservative and highly protective family. Being the youngest, i’m always protected and had most of my needs met because my parents dote on me alot. And naturally, their expectations of my boyfriends have to be pretty up there. This is the point whereby i’ll feel very stressed out and “caught in the middle”. I had my first serious relationship when i was 18 and lasted 2.5 years. He was really sweet and perfectly capable of providing me what my parents would call a “good life”. But things didn’t work out between us due to religious issues and we broke up. Now i’m in another relationship and things were pretty ok. But my mom in particular has very high expectations of my boyfriend. She would expect him to pick me up at my house for every date(he doesn’t have a car and has to rely on public transport), she always tells me that “your guy should do this and that” or “you’re a girl, you shouldn’t be doing all these!” My boyfriend and i quarrelled a number of times in the past because of this. He said that he’s my boyfriend and he knows what to do, he doesn’t need to be told that “he shld do this and shouldn’t do that”. He wants to be treated as a boyfriend, not a servant. Recently, my boyfriend invited me to his graduation parade and he got his mom to pass me the admission tickets. My mom was unhappy because she thinks that my boyfriend’s mom should have been nicer and offer to give me lift to the parade from school since all of us are going. SIGH..
Personally, i feel really tired having to meet my mom’s expectations and being caught in between my mom and boyfriend. Sometimes i have to resort to lying to my mom so it doesn’t upset her. I know my mom wants the best for me and although it’s nice being treated like a princess but i know in a relationship it’s about give and take and striking a healthy balance. But sometimes the comments my mom makes really affects me. She doesn’t like me to go over to my boyfriend’s house because it’s “unladylike” to go over. And i can foresee many other problems that can arise in the near future regarding this issue alone. For eg if my boyfriend’s mom isn’t as nice to me, my mom would want me to leave my boyfriend as she feared if i marry my bf, his mom will ill-treat me etc. Should i just not care about other things and enjoy the time spent with my boyfriend?

[Ask April Masini]

It sounds like you’re in your early 20s and that means you have a balancing act in front of you.

First of all, I happen to agree with your mother on most of the issues you’ve mentioned! 🙂 But just because I agree with them, doesn’t mean that they’re right for you — at this time in your life. So what I’d like you to do is to really listen to your mother, who appears to have your back in a way many young women don’t have the benefit of, but only incorporate into your own life, works for you.

Imagine if you went to a doctor or a nutritionist for diet advice. You’d listen to the diet rules, and then knowing your own body better than any doctor, nutritionist or diet book author, you’d incorporate what worked for you in order to lose the weight you wanted to lose. Same thing goes with your mom and dating advice.

Since you’re an adult now, and aren’t living at your mother’s home, you can start setting up your own adult relationship with your mother, and that means you can have some boundaries. You don’t have to tell her everything and you don’t have to take her advice on everything. You can also tell her that you appreciate her advice and opinions, but that on this issue or another issue what works for you is x, y and z. Conversation will ensue if you’re lucky. Fighting will ensue if you’re not so lucky. But either way, rather than seeing this as a bad thing, try and see it as an opportunity for you and your mother to get to know each other and respect each other as adults. Be patient with your mom — and with yourself. Even if you have to end a concussive argument with, “You’re driving me crazy, but I love you all the same,” you’ll have made headway in this relationship with your mother.

Separating from parents is a lifelong process! Balance is the key to doing it gracefully. So see if you can muster respect for your mother, with respect for yourself as your relationship with your mom changes while you’re a dating adult.

As for your dates and boyfriends, just because your mother gives you advice, does not mean you should be relaying your mom’s rules to your boyfriends. What that does is give you a child’s safety net. You’re basically telling your boyfriend how your mom says he should be treating you, but not taking responsibility for your own feelings about how he should be treating you. In other words, you’re hiding behind your mother’s apron strings. You can’t have it both ways! 😉

If you have standards for a date or a boyfriend that aren’t being met, and your boyfriend doesn’t agree with them, then rather than fighting him on these issues, decide if this is a deal breaker or not. Sometimes one of these issues is not a deal breaker, but the litany of them are. This is why you date men — to figure out who is compatible with you and vice verse. In fact, you can ask your mother if she had any of these manners or values issues with your father when she was dating him, and if so, how she handled them. You can even get to know her further than you have before, by asking her what her dating life was like, and if her parents had issues with her dates, ever. This two way sharing of experience will level the playing field with you and your mother.

So basically, cut your mom some slack — she’s really trying to do a good job as a mother of an adult child — and use the conflict to further deepen and create your own adult relationship with her, and to incorporate what you do value in her advice, [i]tacitly[/i] into your own dating rules that you employ with dates and boyfriends.

I hope this helps!

[Author]

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