Letters to the Editor
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Couple of pages missing...
I had a friend who used to say, upon hearing an eyebrow-raising story of this sort, that "this book has a couple of the pages torn out", i.e., the ones with essential plot information. I am not quite sure this letter "fake" but it definitely raises some red flags.
This is the LW's FIANCE, not just her boyfriend. Is it possible they never had a conversation about his childhood or prior life until she visited his parents? If so, I question their responsibility in getting engaged when they were so ignorant about each other's families and lives in general.
Conversations about money, about lifestyle, about "how we are going to live" are integral to a mature adult's deciding to get married and commence on a life together. It's painfully obvious that the fiance blindsided the LW when he brought her to the family "mansion" to meet his parents and presumably announce their engagement.
I can't help but wonder what the rich parents thought when Sonny-Boy showed up with a fiance who was not only poor but from a tragically dysfunctional, wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing. In most cases, this would be a rich parent's worst nightmare, i.e., the Scion of the family marrying trailer park trash. So....what happened when she went to the Mansion? All we hear is that she was bowled over by the big house and the acoutrements of wealth. We don't hear about the parents or how they reacted, and this strikes me as false. Most women would be far more affected by the parent's reaction than any real estate or interior decorating.
It suggests to me that the fiance (no matter how outwardly "nice") IS a poseur, pretending to be a man of the working class...maybe to rub his rich parent's face in it. And the LW is part of this package. In other words, their engagement is a symbolic rebellion against his parents. If so, their future marriage is doomed because this kind of childish rebellion (using other people!) is cruel and dead ended.
It is very unlikely that the fiance will be able to keep up his "pretend working class lifestyle" indefinitely, as he will tire of Kraft Mac & Cheese and old junker cars, and like the vast majority of the privileged, will find some excuse to wend his way back to his family and his lifestyle. In doing so, I suspect he will starting finding the LW provincial and cheap and paranoid, and that she has lower middle class taste and lacks the ablity to ski, play tennis, or watch polo ponies and this will start to grate on him. He'll start thinking his parents were maybe right after all, and he should have married a girl from his own class.
Among my other thoughts: has he suggested a pre-nup? It seems unlikely that anyone these days of real inherited wealth would NOT bring this up. What about an engagement ring? Presumably the LW was presented with one when they got engaged -- was it a little dust chip OR a mega-rock? Few women would be unable to tell the difference.
Although people fantasize about marrying into great wealth (yes, even men), in most cases where this occurs it is not nearly as happy as you might imagine. The wealthier partner often ends up resenting the fact that they have to pay for everything and that the poorer partner can end up being seen as a kind of parasite -- not just by the rich partner but by society in general. That's not a very nice way to be thought of, even if you get to enjoy a lot of perks.
It's an old (but often accurate) truism that people are the happiest when they marry someone a good deal like themselves -- similar backgrounds, religion, physical attractiveness, race, income, political views, etc. I am not saying that NO other marriages ever work out, it's just that odds are vastly better when you marry someone more or less like yourself, or with only one or two exceptions. The fiance sounds like he is NOTHING like the LW, and also that he's deceptive, unrealistic and acting out against his parent's. None of this bodes for a happy married life.
People fight more about money in a marriage than anything else (children, sex, etc.), so if this engagement is the least bit sincere then BOTH parties need extensive marriage counseling, and the fiance needs to come clean and put ALL his cards on the table, and the LW also needs a really good attorney so that any pre-nup genuinely treats her fairly in the event of the likely divorce.
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He does not sound "filthy" despite being rich
I’ll admit to a prejudice – I think many people from monied backgrounds suffer from a certain level of social cluelessness. They do not understand that decisions they make, or things they do, seemingly without thought, are not possible for other people. A short piece of personal history here – I come from a career diplomatic family, but not a wealthy one, and I was an adult before my parents started being handed a mansion with servants to live in, and grew up 8-20 with them on a series of headquarters assignments, horrified at unpayable bills and mortgages, and knew there was no fortune to be left to me. Funny that, I was a rich/not-very-poor boy often surrounded by the rich. Odder yet were those from much wealthier backgrounds than me, who resented me because they thought I was rich, or at least richer than them. Given that this group had no idea what my family did when I was growing up (his dad is “some sort of civil servant”), in darned trousers, without vast stores of cash, and as kids do, rubbed in my ‘relative’ poverty I regret to say I took some schadenfreude at their resentment. The diplomatic kids though that have a tough time are the ones who were kids when their parent was sent to an embassy (careers service, i.e., not-US.) They did grow up as rich kids, big house, servants, private international schools, go on holidays with rich classmates – but you know they graduate, or daddy or mammy retires, and suddenly they are ordinary people – and a lot handle it badly, really badly . . .
The thing is, there are different types of rich people and different types of poor people. Think of it as like the Rooseveldts and the Bushes – by the time a member of either family occupied the White House, both families had been wealthy so long that no living member would remember when the family had nothing. The Rooseveldts, Teddy, cousin Franklin, and cousin Eleanor were rich, seriously rich – but they turned out to be decent people with a real empathy for the ordinary man, the poor and the disadvantaged. Need I say how different that is from the 3-4 whole generations of the Bush family to have held public office (who incidentally made it their bound objective to roll-back what the Rooseveldts had done in acts of class-treason.)
It sounds to me like boyfriend can be a tad clueless at times – but he seems a decent sort. He also reminds me of something that has been forgotten, not flaunting it. In countries like France, Ireland and a few other I have lived in, making wealth obvious was until recently seriously frowned on, in France because it could cause blood revolution (and indeed had) and in Ireland because so many people until the 1990s were simply broke, rubbing their nose in it was bad manners.
For all the people who want to criticise the boyfriend/fiancée – seems that he is a decent guy, who does not see the need to flaunt his wealth. How beat up is his car – is it actually unsafe, or is it just a nondescript average car on which everything important works. Is his apartment tolerable, or in a building crawling with druggies and roaches – if its clean, big enough for his needs, and safe, why should he rent or buy a big f*ck-*ff place?
Perhaps you need to see his attitude to money as an admirable quality, that he sees no benefit in flaunting it, that he is quiet about it, and tries, sometimes unsuccessfully to be discreet about it.
I am now, well not rich, but pretty well off. My wife and I between us earn a multi-six figure income – and we spend it, mostly on a tribe of builders renovating houses. But we don’t flaunt it – if nothing else it would piss-off the clients that pay for my income. Indeed, I have a horror of 'bling,' I won’t wear anything gold or gold plated, even my wedding ring is white gold and looks like stainless. I know what it is like to be broke though, a paycheck away from being out of my apartment.
Finally, you need to think about something, if you and your siblings went to good schools, got good educations, have good jobs, chances are you will, even off your own efforts be well off, even by the standards of your childhood-rich; that’s what happened to me. Will you resent yourself? So your boyfriend is from wealthy background – seems he is a good guy despite it.