Dear Prudence,
My fiancé and I live in a two-bedroom apartment. The second bedroom is our guest room/home office. There is no laundry unit on site, so doing clothes means taking baskets to the laundromat across town and spending half the day there. I usually wait until we are at critical mass before doing so. Same thing for groceries since the only good grocery store is on the other side of town.
Recently, my fiancé was out of town when his mother and sister called me to say they were on their way to “surprise” us with a visit. They were doing a road trip and decided to make a detour to see us. I had twelve hours’ notice. I rushed off work to vacuum and clean the bathroom. I had coffee, eggs, oranges, and half a loaf of bread. I figured it was enough to make a decent breakfast, but the only clean sheets were jokey Christmas sheets. They arrived and I ordered take out for dinner. Everything seemed fine until breakfast the next morning, when my fiancé’s sister informed me she was not just a vegetarian anymore but vegan, so all she could eat were the oranges. I made a joke asking if coffee was still okay, but the mood was definitely sour when they left.
I didn’t give it another thought, but they did. They blew up my fiancé’s phone about what a horrible housekeeper and host I was. Apparently, I deliberately made them feel unwelcome by making them sleep on Christmas sheets and had no food his sister could eat but oranges, and my coffee joke was completely out of line. My fiancé agrees his mother and sister shouldn’t have surprised me like that, but he thinks I could have put in more effort. When my family visits, he pointed out, I always make sure to have food and clean sheets on hand. I yelled back that my family actually asks when they can visit and gives us more than a half-day’s notice. Other than going to the skeevy gas station down the street where the drug dealers hang out, there are no close options for food. And next time I will solve the situation by telling them to get a hotel. My fiancé thinks that is beyond rude, and I told him that this mother and sister were the rude ones.
This entire debacle has me rethinking our engagement. We haven’t had this problem before, but we have hit snags where he has sided with this family over me, though it has been things like not bringing the right food to a potluck or my clothing not being formal enough for church.
I brushed those off, but I can’t brush this off. Am I overreacting here? (My own family as very toxic, so I will admit my baseline here may be out of whack.)
— Guest Trouble