This may be long, but please read.
My boyfriend and I are finising college, and have been dating for almost a year. We've talked about getting married (jokingly and not) for a while now. I've spent time with his family (spent Christmas with them, actually), and I love them and I'm pretty sure they love me.
He's spent time with my family too, and they are....less than enthusiastic. My mom, who is judgemental, opinionated, stubborn, and an overall hard person to get along with, claims she likes him "as a person" every time I ask her. She is kind and welcomes him into her home, but she voices concerns to me that are harsh and make him very uncomfortable when I pass them along.
She worries that he'll make me "live in poverty," for example, due to the fact that it is extremely important to him to help the poor. I try to explain what his plans are for that (which are perfectly reasonable, and will definitely NOT cause us to live in the kind of poverty that she imagines), but she doesn't believe me. She claims that I am very go-with-the-flow (which is true) and is concerned that he will steamroll my opinion when it comes to big life decisions. I know he won't, but again she think's I'm being naive and too trusting.
So, recently he found out that with a specific graduate school program he wants to get into, he'll get benefits and a salary. Which was my biggest stipulation before we can get married. I told my mom about the program, not about the we-might-get-married part, and she immediately caught on. She went off about this, that, and the other thing, (i don't even remember, it became a jumble of words after a while).
So what do I do? How do I convince her that he'll be a great husband and, someday, father? At what point do I give up and say "my life, my problems, leave me alone"? He's doing everything he can, but nothing is good enough.