I was really glad to get advice from the members of this board last time about my friend, and this seems like a good place for FIL advice, so here goes nothing...
My fiancé (G) currently lives with his parents, at their insistence. G and I both graduated from college in December and his living situation has less to do with his own finances than it does with his parents' situation. He also feels obligated to watch out for them, being the only child. However, he has found living with them to be almost unbearable because of his father (S) and he hopes to move as soon as he can land a better job. Myself, I cannot honestly whether S is well-meaning but eccentric or truly mean-spirited.
The biggest offense in my eyes is his behavior toward G. Why he expects his son to have any positive feelings toward him I feel I will never understand, but maybe I just don’t get his unusual brand of humor? However, I am not very comfortable with the situation when he freely admits and discusses with me, as though G were not even in the room, the fact that he was both emotionally and physically abusive during G's childhood and then laughs about it! Furthermore, he goes on to repeatedly instruct both G and myself that we should never beat our children because we will be failures as parents like he was, and then our children will be failures just like G. This happens literally every time I see his father, which until recently was at least twice a week, and perhaps more often when I am not around. It is a mean, unfair comment no matter what, but since when did being a caring, loving, intelligent, responsible adult with the discipline to obtain a degree in math qualify as a failure? And FWIW G is amazing with children and would never hurt a fly if it bit him.
S also seems to operate under the delusion that even after the years of abuse followed by the onslaught of thinly-veiled insults G will be just peachy with being his best buddy any day, any time. S is disabled and unemployed, leaving him with apparently nothing to do all day but follow G around the house every second he’s there, talking literally nonstop at a volume that is actually painful for me when I am around it, all but eliminating G's ability to perform any task requiring the remotest degree of concentration. He follows G into his bedroom at night, preventing G from sleeping. He follows G into the bathroom in the morning and talks while G showers and then G has to wait until his dad will finally agree to leave before he can get out. Once he does get out of the bathroom in his towel, his dad is waiting in the hallway and tries to follow G into his room while he gets dressed.
G always makes it a point to get necessary things done around their house before he leaves for even an afternoon, and he pulls his own weight, so to speak, by doing his own cooking, laundry, etc. However, if G is absent on the “wrong” day, or gone for too long too many days in a row, his father gets angry because he isn't "taking care of them." If G objects to any of this, even in a nice way, or even just tells his dad to tone it down a bit, S gets upset, even angry.
In addition, S was involved years ago in a settlement with one of his doctors, part of which was that somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000 a year was to go to my fiancé for each year he was in college. G’s education was largely financed through scholarships and grants and he did not have to use much of the money at all, maybe $10,000 total, leaving about $30,000 extra that was legally his. Again, being a responsible man, G chose to invest this money so that it could grow into a considerable savings while he was in school. G has taken money from this account on more than one occasion to pay his parents’ bills. They essentially consider it a shared account, except when S likes to forget the “shared” part and hold it over G’s head.
For example, G had his heart set on taking me on a two-week trip to Australia after our graduation as a celebration, since he knows one of my biggest life wishes is to travel and it’s somewhere we’ve both wanted to go. He spent time carefully planning and budgeting to make sure he could afford it and was fine with the amount that he would have to draw from his savings. His father then generously offered to help us out with the trip. I wasn’t exactly sure where he could possibly have gotten the money to do so, since his finances are so tight that he apparently cannot flush his toilet because he has to save the money on the water. I was concerned that maybe S was being generous beyond his means and asked G whether we should refuse his father’s offer, but all he said was that they shared the savings money so it didn’t really matter “who” was paying for it. Apparently S didn’t get that memo because he felt the need to constantly remind G that “*I* am paying for a lot of this trip, so you have to do X, Y, and Z for me.” We will not be accepting any more “help” from him.
I could seriously go on and on for pages. He is an alcoholic and an addict and tries to force and/or guilt my fiancé into these habits (G, of course, refuses consistently). He is rude to me when I am there, he is rude to his wife in front of others, and he is obviously beyond rude to my fiancé.
To say the least, my fiancé CANNOT be out of that hellhole soon enough. If they truly need the help around the house so badly G is willing to go there on certain days and help them out without having to actually live there. I feel terrible seeing him so stressed and feeling there's nothing I can do.