Dear Carolyn: My 19-year-old college freshman wants to marry her boyfriend. My husband and I pay her tuition, room and board for college.
I don’t think parents should be supporting married children. I proposed continuing to pay her tuition but she and her husband support themselves for room and board. My husband thinks that’s “changing the deal” we have with our daughter and wants to pay the same amount we have been paying. What do you think? — Anonymous
Anonymous: Define “should.”
Is it about outcome, principle, deterrence?
Deterrence is self-explanatory. You don’t like her life choice, so you attach a large material consequence to it. I’m no fan of the tactic — punitive child rearing always seemed off to me, so punitive adult rearing mystifies — but you can’t fault its simplicity.
Principle is one both parents can cite to back your positions. His: You promised her an education and there was no “don’t get married” clause. Yours: Adults making adult decisions are adult enough to support themselves.
These both have merit on their faces, and some satisfying simplicity of their own — but they also contradict some obvious unspoken things beneath the surface. First, it’s kind of understood that if you’re functioning as a dependent for educational purposes, then the “don’t marry your boyfriend” part doesn’t need to be spoken. (Does it?) On the other side, your daughter has been an adult since age 18 and yet that hasn’t precluded your paying her tuition, room and board as if she’s a fully dependent child — so if you’re already working from a gray and fuzzy definition of adulthood, then you don’t get to declare that a black-and-white one is in force on just this topic alone because you want it to be. Not without hypocrisy. Why is it okay to finance a grown woman’s education in full only if she’s an unmarried grown woman?
Finally, outcome: the pragmatist’s refuge. If the point of paying for her education was to equip her in early adulthood to live independently thereafter, on (this is often the unspoken part) a middle-class rung of the ladder or better, then there’s no reason you can’t continue to make your decisions with that goal in mind — in light of the threatened marriage or of any other rearrangement of her personal life. The baseline facts can change but the age-related goal can remain intact: Equip her in early adulthood to launch stably ever after.
If you and your husband — and daughter — can agree on that goal, then that’ll clarify which decisions make sense to achieve it.
Dear Carolyn: Do I have an obligation to attend a dinner, for instance, with a sour step-mother-in-law my husband tolerates only so he can see his dad? I find the facade intolerable — putting up with her control and her demeaning attitude to access my husband’s dad. I see my husband’s over-the-top attention to her as groveling, which he says is to protect me from having to deal with her at the table. This is toxic. Do I go numb? — Demeaned
Demeaned: Your obligation is to the marriage — not on his terms, but on mutual ones. If your husband won’t compromise toward your sanity, then he’s shorting his duty.
Sometimes the bluntest instrument is best: an agreed-upon limit. You attend … half of these torture sessions? A quarter? You offer some presence to protect him, he offers some absence to protect you. Thoughtfully ever after.
And if the “groveling” dims your feelings for him, then you owe the marriage the truth about that, too.
