why wont He listen?

[del-2-5-2014 1,339]

I have expressed how important it is for my fiance to see my parents but time and time again he gives me tons of excuses and insists that he has promised so he will. Now its been a year now and still nothing has changed . How am i supposed to take this being that I do everything he asks me to do and I go out of my way to fly 5000+ miles to see him despite the fact that I work. sacrificed soo much and the one thing i ask he just doesnt do it . what does it mean? I need to know what is going on. Because i have made a tremendous effort with his family n yet he just wont do the same for me keeps telling me he will and to be honest as of now im really tired of it.

To me this is unacceptable and I agree with you.

My Fiancee spends the last weekend of each month with my Mom in Nigeria and I never even asked her to do this. Some things like this shouldn't even need to be requested.

I don't think he cares about you, at least as much as you care about him.

How you proceed is up to you but this is how I feel about this.

[riss 12]

The biggest question I have is, what is your relationship with him like otherwise? It's really hard for us to gauge what's going on here, as you can probably see from the range of responses - because the only context any of us have is our own background and experience. If your relationship with him has been really good, trusting, and genuine in every other way, and he's just baulking about meeting your family, then I would say, try not to get too anxious, put in the effort to go deeper and work this through. But if overall you didn't feel like you could communicate openly on important things and have a strong level of trust between you, then there would be a bigger question you need to be looking at here. I'm assuming since you are marrying him, that outside of this issue the two of you do have an overall high level of trust and agreement on values and so on.

In Asia, as an example from my experience, I do notice that there is often a cultural tendency for people to say 'yes, yes, I will do that,' even when a person has no intention of doing what they've said, because it's considered impolite to refuse another person's request. So you get a lot of people agreeing to do something and then when the time comes, making some excuse or making no excuse at all, just dipping out, not feeling that they can or should explain their real feelings and concerns or problems or reasons. It's considered acceptable by many people to do this, rather than to have a confrontation and to directly disagree or refuse. Again, I don't know if this is relevant to your situation, though.

My fiancé is in the US and I am in Australia, and he very much wants to get to know my parents. However, my parents have been very VERY reticent about being in contact with him. He has emailed them, short notes, long ones, and if they reply at all it's only briefly. This is sort of round the other way! My fiancé really longs to be part of our family but my parents have been so uncooperative, even though I beg them to contact him and I tell them how much it would mean to both of us. I know they would be much more open to him if he were living here and we could meet them together - but I know they just feel really strange about trying to get to know him without me being there at the same time. So we have occasionally had some Skype conversations when I have been at their house, but they always run away after a couple of minutes of pleasantries. I wonder if your fiancé may just feel very nervous and uncomfortable about seeing your parents, and wondering whether he will make a good impression, as others have said.

Sometimes in every relationship there are communication breakdowns. I guess the big question here is, do you think that overall he is someone you can trust? Is this just an issue that he's stuck on because he has a mental block about it?

Edited September 15, 2012 by riss