You'd still need to have cleared that with your SO. If they're fine with it then live that dream! If they're not then refer to option 2.

I would advise the letter writer to interrogate the idea that their mother is “hard to love” when they didn’t even know one of their parents was having an affair. They clearly don’t know everything that was going on and seems like they have a favorite parent so I am highly skeptical of that determination. If their dad…

Or perhaps she was one of the couple of dozen people who bothered to see that movie, and it just . . . planted a seed.

OMG I am so sorry you had to experience that. The DNA tests are making this behavior worse. In the Native community we call them Pretendians.

I suspect many of her negative feelings about her mother are deflections of things she has not been allowed to feel about her father. The only women I know who don’t have any issues with their fathers are those who have terrible issues with their mothers. 

“Have you considered telling your dad how disorienting this has been for you? Having a conversation about what this might mean for your relationship? Yelling at him for a bit about what a loathsome shit he’s been to your mom?”

Perhaps Emma Stone’s role in Aloha was written with this lady in mind.

I know three middle aged women, who are battling cervical cancer because their husband cheated, infected them with HPV and they had no idea they had been infected until the cancer arrived. So cheating isn’t just a moral issue at that point. Criminal, in every sense of the word. If you cheat, you are an ass- If your…

Peak Boomer shit.

Agreed. I wanted more information on her relationship with both parents, because neither relationship sounded that solid.

you have two options if you want sex and your spouse doesnt:

Yeah. Maybe this writer’s mother was “difficult to love” because she was being gaslit, deceived, stolen from (money spent on the affair partners is money taken from the primary relationship), having her trust broken, her health put in jeopardy, and her time wasted. Seems to me the letter writer owes their mother years…

Maybe your mom was so hard to love because you’re dad was off dicking around with other women? Women usually have a sixth sense about these things. She may have suspected that he was a cheater but didn’t confront him because: ignorance can be bliss, she wanted to keep her family intact, she didn’t want her kids…

Yep. That she thinks of “what a rational adult does as a matter of course” as “pampering” says a lot. It’s not pampering to do your fair share of household chores.

Is this a generational thing? As a cranky, former latch-key child of a non-helicopter mother, I find it puzzling that some “adults” make their parent’s relationships all about THEM. 

I find it telling that the LW’s last paragraph is all about her fears that if she doesn’t continue her relationship with her dad he’ll start drinking or self-harming. That says volumes about what she was raised to believe was her responsibility. 

Yeah, to me, the only way forward is to talk it out with the father. Tell him you’re angry, disappointed, confused, whatever. Listen to what he has to say in return. As far as being afraid he’s going to harm himself in some way... if that’s a realistic concern, then he needs professional help and you need to tell him…

Yeah that stuck out to me. The “pampering” she describes are all things many women do by default. 

One of the hardest things to realize as an adult is that you don’t know your parents the way they know each other.

“Doing the laundry” is not “pampering” ffs. It’s doing the basics as a partner in a marriage.