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I'm second place to FI's daughter.

mrsconn23mrsconn23 member
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in Wedding Woes

Dear Prudence,

I am thinking of ending my engagement. We have been together for three years and he has an 11-year-old daughter. I understand his daughter comes first, but I am wondering if I will ever be a priority for him. We were visiting his family over Christmas and went skiing. I fell badly and hurt my back. That night I asked him to rub my back and legs to help me fall asleep, but his daughter came in complaining she didn’t want to sleep over with her cousins. She wanted daddy. My fiancé didn’t even hesitate. He got up and took his daughter to the other room to sleep in. He didn’t even move the water closer to me on the nightstand. I told him how hurt and worthless he made me feel at that moment. He told me to get over it and I was making something out of nothing. I have gotten conflicting advice from friends. Some are telling me to cut and run while others say things will settle down when his daughter gets older. I need an outside opinion here, please.

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Re: I'm second place to FI's daughter.

  • short+sassyshort+sassy member
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    ((Gasp!!))  This exact letter was on one of Reddit's AITA sub-reddits!
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  • charlotte989875charlotte989875 member
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    You’re an adult who was presumably fine, albeit in pain and uncomfortable, but at least safe and secure. She’s a child who was asking for help navigating a situation with her cousins. She does take priority in that moment. And once she was settled he could come rub your back if you hadn’t tried to compete with his child. 

    You should end the engagement not because he’s not prioritizing you but because you don’t seem to understand that he’s a parent. 
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  • STARMOON44STARMOON44 member
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    charlotte989875 said:
    You’re an adult who was presumably fine, albeit in pain and uncomfortable, but at least safe and secure. She’s a child who was asking for help navigating a situation with her cousins. She does take priority in that moment. And once she was settled he could come rub your back if you hadn’t tried to compete with his child. 

    You should end the engagement not because he’s not prioritizing you but because you don’t seem to understand that he’s a parent. 
    She’s an 11 year old who could be put back to bed by herself instead of sleeping with her dad and he could have been nice about it. Prioritizing your kid doesn’t mean you do whatever they want whenever they want. So agreed she should end the engagement but I don’t think she’s the problem here. 
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  • charlotte989875charlotte989875 member
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    STARMOON44 said:
    charlotte989875 said:
    You’re an adult who was presumably fine, albeit in pain and uncomfortable, but at least safe and secure. She’s a child who was asking for help navigating a situation with her cousins. She does take priority in that moment. And once she was settled he could come rub your back if you hadn’t tried to compete with his child. 

    You should end the engagement not because he’s not prioritizing you but because you don’t seem to understand that he’s a parent. 
    She’s an 11 year old who could be put back to bed by herself instead of sleeping with her dad and he could have been nice about it. Prioritizing your kid doesn’t mean you do whatever they want whenever they want. So agreed she should end the engagement but I don’t think she’s the problem here. 
    Depends on what the issue is, which is why I think Dad needs to look in and see what’s up. Is someone bullying/ being a jerk? Is daughter? Yes, kids can put themselves to bed but they sometimes need an adult to intervene.

    He absolutely shouldn’t have said to just deal with it, but I wonder if this isn’t the first time LW has complained about him tending to his kid. 
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  • short+sassyshort+sassy member
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    Not enough information.  Though this doesn't seem like a deal breaker, overall.

    I feel like it should have been handled by the dad asking the LW to excuse him for a bit, while he comforted/helped his daughter.  But it sounds like he slept in the same bedroom with his daughter, instead of returning to his own bedroom with the LW.  That's weird and really excessive.

    TBH, I'm also a bit eyerolling that either an 11-year-old child or a grown woman needs someone to sit with them until they fall asleep unless maybe something pretty extreme happened.  

    The sentence about the water seemed extra petty.  Had the LW even asked for the water to be moved closer to her?  Or was it just an extra flame on the fire that he didn't foretell he should have moved it closer, so she was annoyed later that he wasn't there to do it.

    On the surface, his response to her when she told him how she had felt was unnecessarily dismissive and mean.  But that petty water comment is having me wonder what prefaced the jerky response.  Did he initially apologize and sincerely listen to her.  But she continued to be a drama llama, so he lashed back with a rude comment.  I could see that also.

    I'm also curious about the rest of the time after her injury.  Was it also a suck it up attitude?  Or was he being sympathetic and doing what he could to make her more comfortable.

    This was also a one-off situation.  The LW doesn't give any indication, either way, if they normally feel neglected by him.
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  • kerbohlkerbohl member
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    MyNameIsNot said:
    The problem is not that he put the kid to bed. The problem is that he told her to shut up and get over it when she expressed her feelings. 

    Don't stay with a man who doesn't listen to you.
    I agree, I sort of thought she might be seeing things until that statement.  Though it does also depend on how she brought it up.  I agree with the needing more info for this one.
    It also depends on the extent of her injury.  But I'm thinking that if she was so bad that she needed someone to sit up with her, she maybe should have gone to the hospital?  And that would have been mentioned?  Just falling and maybe bruising a tailbone, that hurts like crazy but you can function.

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  • CasadenaCasadena member
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    I think she sounds like a whiner. Of course the father should attend to his daughter over a grown ass woman.

    However, i'm not clear if the dad left to just help the daughter, or if he stayed with her all night and never came back to LW? That would be odd imo, but i still don't like this LW's approach. 
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  • banana468banana468 member
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    An 11yo still needs help navigating a situation especially in a different location.

    Need to know way more here because right now the situation is making it look like it's a battle of the needy ladies especially with both of them in a new place.   Was LW in so much pain that she couldn't move at all?  I'm not getting why he needed to move the water because if she was that immobile then how did she get up to use the facilities?  

    I also don't get that she slept with dad but that he got out of bed to put her to sleep in a different space and that meant that the immediate priority was the kid who wasn't falling asleep over the grown adult who wanted a back rub.   


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  • banana468banana468 member
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    MyNameIsNot said:
    The problem is not that he put the kid to bed. The problem is that he told her to shut up and get over it when she expressed her feelings. 

    Don't stay with a man who doesn't listen to you.
    She said she felt worthless because he didn't give her a backrub or move the water.   He should listen to her but the letter reads really melodramatic. 
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