My boyfriend and I have been together for a year. For the entire time, his ex has been bothering us, trying to break us up. To make things worse, they have a child together, and she is pregnant again by another man. The thing that really bothers me is that she's still bothering my fiance. I mean she tells him that they should be really close friends for the sake of their daughter, but she's really only doing it because she wants to start fights between me and him.

I can't take it that she still wants to break us up even though she's pregnant with another man. And I hate that my fiance wants her to be his best friend.

To me this means that he has no respect for me for what all she has done to us. I know the child is not to blame, but I think my fiance should respect me, not her.

Can you help me? This is breaking me apart...

Sadder than sad on a bad day.

---

Dear Sad,

Dealing with a partner's ex can be one or the most challenging issues for any couple, especially when there are children involved. But because your fiance's ex is also the mother of his daughter, it will always be in his best interest--as well as the child's--to maintain a good working relationship with this woman.

This may not be what you want to hear, but my advice to you is to forget about ever having your husband's ex out of your lives, and start working on accepting that she's always going to be there to some extent, some of the time. The only questions are: How good a relationship are you willing to have with her? And: How hard are you willing to work to have the best relationship possible? To do anything else would, in my professional opinion, be short-sighted and potentially damaging, both to your relationship and to your relationships with your fiance's child.

Over the past twenty years, I've seen too many couples fighting for decades over the relationship a wife or husband has with his or her ex-spouse. Usually, it's connected to the kids in some way, often related to the allocation of time or money spent on them. Not only does this cause terrible friction between husbands and wives, but it destroys relationships between parents and their children and stepchildren.

Children whose parents show respect and concern for each other--even those parents who are no longer married to each other--grow up feeling safe and secure.

Children whose parents fight, are disrespectful of each other, or put children in the middle of their disagreements, grow up feeling angry, insecure, and torn by their parents' conflicts with each other.

If your fiancé wants to maintain a friendship with his ex, my suggestion is that the two of you talk about how to make this feel as safe and as comfortable for you as possible. Obviously, if this woman tried to pull the two of you apart in the past, it's going to take some time before you trust her. Maybe you won't ever trust her. But you will have to deal with her. That is certain.

The important thing is that you are going to have to be flexible, and your requests of your fiancé need to be reasonable. For example, it may seem reasonable to you to ask your fiancé not to talk to his ex unless you're present. But it's really not reasonable, since there will certainly be times when he has to talk to her and you're not there. Insisting on such an agreement would be setting yourself up to be let down.

I once had client whose wife had an affair with a man she had met at work. The couple divorced, and the wife married the other man. My client and his ex-wife shared custody of their young son, who shuttled back and forth between the two households. You can only imagine how angry my client was, leaving his son at his ex-wife's house where she lived with the man she had betrayed him with.

Nonetheless, he chose to be as gracious as possible to his ex-wife, her new husband, and the children the two of them later had together. Not because he felt like it, but because he wanted the best for his son, who now had a new stepfather and eventually, siblings. Twenty-five years later, my client and his ex are good friends. They had a rough time at first, but they were both committed to their son, and their commitment paid off.

You and your husband's ex may never be good friends. But it is well worth trying to build a good relationship with her. And the sooner, the better. Otherwise, your bitterness is likely to contaminate your marriage.

Best of luck,

Betsy