Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve been with my fiancé for five years. The first six months of our relationship were an affair—I was 24 and he was 31—and I found out early on that he was married, kept telling myself to break things off, but was never was able to do it. His (now ex-)wife learned about the relationship and was willing to try to work things out, but he ultimately chose to divorce her. During the initial months following the revelation of the affair, I put up with a lot of abuse from her. I truly felt bad for what she was going through, and I recognized that a lot of it was my fault, so I would just listen and apologize. I never tried to pass the blame or name-call back. I knew I was in the wrong, and I did what I could not to add to her pain. But after all this time, she still hates me, and to this day I have never met the kid they had together, though my fiancé sees his daughter at least once a week. To his ex-wife, there are no good people who sometimes do bad things, just good and bad people, and I am a bad person.
When the three of us sat down in counseling to discuss my meeting their daughter, she said I was the devil and it would disrupt the daughter’s life to meet me. According to her, the kid barely even wants to see her dad because “she is terrified of him.” I asked why—because there is absolutely no reason for her to be afraid of him, and I think she is poisoning the kid against her dad—and she didn’t have an answer. When I asked if she thought it was healthy for her daughter to be frightened of her father, she responded “really not my problem.” The result of the counseling session was that we agreed that in three months they would tell the child that I exist, but there was still no solid plan for my meeting her. What now?
—Sad and Confused