Dear Betsy,

For the whole year my fiance and I have been together his ex has been trying to break us up. They have one child together and now she is pregnant by another man. You'd think she'd want to move on, but no! She wants to break us up so she can have her cake and eat it too.

She always acts all nicey nicey around me and insists that my fiance is her best friend. She says she wants him to stay that way--supposedly for the sake of their daughter. I'm not buying it. She continues to treat my fiance like her boyfriend and is always saying things to him that start fights between us. Why can't she just leave us alone! And why does my fiance accept her meddling in our business? I think he must have no respect for me.

How can I get this woman out of my life so we can get on with our life together?

Please help. I'm such a wreck lately my hair is starting to fall out.

Signed,

Second Fiddle

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Dear SF,

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 the fact that she's always going to be there to some extent at least some of the time.

The question can't be: How can you get her out of your life? The questions that make more sense 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 with your fiance, and to your relationship with your future husband'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 fiance 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 fiance need to be reasonable. For example, it may seem reasonable to you to ask your fiance 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