My son never once went to see his long-distance lover, who came to visit him nearly every month. He refused to try despite my constant encouragement, in part because my wife insisted that she was afraid of his flying. Eventually, the relationship ended, and the girlfriend is now seeing someone else.
I explained to my kid that I knew why she had left and that he was to blame for it because he had made no attempt to maintain the connection. He and my wife are now furious with me.
AITA for expressing it? I continue to believe that it was true.
NTA. Though I suspect that’s only part of the story, yeah, I’ll bet the GF was feeling this was pretty one-sided.
Exactly, she was putting in all the effort and he wasn’t.
if he didn’t value her enough to travel to her then yeah, she probably got that message loud and clear.
And your wife is weird, it was fine for the gf to get flights but not her son? What’s with that?
> What’s with that?
OP’s wife is a “boy mom” is my guess.
Ed. note: removed unnecessary punctuation. 🙂
I don’t know how much more to it there needs to be, though.
I was very in love with a very good guy that only ever came to see me once.
His family was very strictly religious so I always had to stay in hotels when I did travel up, and his dad got shipped overseas for work for a while and left him to “be the man” despite having an older brother to also help mom with the home and a middle school-aged brother. Nobody cheated, nobody fought, I just couldn’t be the only one doing the work to see each other. And I couldn’t afford it without more weekend hours at my job, effectively eliminating any time to travel up anyway.
NTA. I guess he’s been complaining, and you served him some hard, cold truth.
Yeah, sometimes the hard truth is necessary. Hopefully he learns from it.
NTA relationships can’t be one sided.
NTA. But I’m confused – are you saying that your son never flew to see his girlfriend because his MOM is afraid of flying? Is that what happened? Why would HER fear of flying mean that HE can’t fly? Was she not letting him fly? If so, is he an adult who is capable of living his own life and making his own decisions?
LDRs are really difficult and both people have to put an equal amount of energy into communicating, visiting, and making it work. She did all the work – spent all the money, took all the time and energy to travel to him, and he didn’t reciprocate. This isn’t just about flying, but about making an effort.
You are 100% right, and while I’m sure it stung for him to hear it, he needed to hear it.
Wife is upset because if she was the reason he wasn’t flying, you’re technically blaming her too, which naturally is going to sting for her as well. And it means that son will start to blame her too, which of course she doesn’t want.
You aren’t wrong, and sometimes you have to be honest and give some tough love to people.
It looks like the mom was scared for the son to fly, so discouraged it
The mom is afraid of the son flying
Which like, ok? So?
You told him the truth as any decent dad shoud. We want our children to learn from their mistakes and do better next time. But truth hurts sometimes. “You can bring the horse to the water but you cannot force it to drink”
You are far from being the AH. Your wife is the AH actually-for babying your sun to the point that he’s afraid to fly to see his gf all because Mommy told him the “flying is dangerous”. How old is he btw? ….cause I’m wondering if this is a momma’s boy issue. She seems to want to keep him under her wing, which is horrible for his development as an adult.
You encouraging him to travel and trying to advise him on why a girl might have broken up with him is beautiful. And you’re most likely right, I would break up with a guy for never coming back to visit me because “Mommy said flying is dangerous”. That’s a huge red flag to a woman.
NTA
You are parenting. Love is not blind support