Hax 091025
Husband is consumed by disapproval
I’ve been married for 29 years, and we have two adult children, a daughter, 27, and a son, 23. Both are college graduates.
My daughter has a bachelor’s in dance and biochemistry, and my husband’s hope since she was very young is that she become a physician. He has always pushed and encouraged her to do so.
When she was 23, she decided she wanted to pursue dance more and moved to New York City to do some service work and projects for her dance career. She has now lived there four years.
Over this time, my husband has been very difficult about this situation, to the point of going through periods of not really interacting or speaking with her. He refuses to visit her with me and did not come to some of her performances in the city, so I ended up going with other family.
She is now in a relationship with a young man, and it has thrown my husband over the edge. I imagine he feels this may keep her there for good, and maybe now his hopes of her going to medical school are at zero. It’s like he’s throwing a temper tantrum, thinking he can manipulate her the worse he behaves.
I’m to the point where I feel I need to leave him because it’s become difficult even to live together. He won’t let me mention her activities in conversation.
Am I unreasonable for expecting some coming together on this? I understand that he can lovingly disagree with her, but he can still be her father. He’s acting like a child.
— Dancing Alone
He’s acting like an unhinged adult. A child would not stop speaking to or visiting her for choosing dance.
Otherwise, I’m with you.’
You’re not unreasonable to expect your husband to keep his dreams for his kids from affecting his relationship with them — or with you.
Certainly, you wouldn’t expect him to hobble his own ability to function as an independent emotional person-unit over this.
Leaving him seems reasonable, too (lawyer first). Because you don’t want to live with him this way, fair enough, and thinking he’ll come to his paternal senses without big therapy seems most unreasonable, given how invested he is in this lunacy.
Perhaps the separation would provide the wake-up jolt he needs.
It’s not just that it isn’t his life to live, and never was, not even when your daughter was a child. It’s also the specificity of “physician” in his vision for her. It wouldn’t be any more bonkers if he had had a premonition 20 years ago of his daughter all grown up in a red truck and, for that reason, stopped speaking to her now for buying a white subcompact.
This is what he needs to register. And because your husband has already effectively lost his daughter to this fixation, the kindness of the separation would be his chance to salvage their relationship. And himself.
And the marriage, if you want it to be such a chance.
It’s the one defensible case for an ultimatum: when the “or else” is intended for the other’s benefit, not for your own.
So: He gets professional help for this irrational attachment to his own utterly fictionalized vision for somebody else’s life, or he will formalize his isolation from you — or a different consequence, if the separation is underway.
Also? Look out for your son, too. He must need a separate answer at this point.
This is so puzzling and sad. I put the chances that your daughter actually wanted to study biochemistry at about 0 percent.
Email Carolyn Hax at tellme@washpost.com.
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