The Vine: April 29, 2015
I have a brother problem. He started dating a bubbly, charismatic, manipulative woman toward the end of last year.
We met at Christmas, so I’m not basing my opinion of her on nothing; she was very charming but not at all genuine, like she was acting the whole time. He seems to have changed — radically — since. None of us (me, our mother, or our other brother) have heard from him since two days after Christmas. Basically the only reason I know he’s not somewhere in a ditch is because he occasionally updates his Facebook. He doesn’t respond to phone calls or texts.
One of the recent pictures shows her name tattooed on him — the tat isn’t the issue, more that he’s been married twice and neither of his exes or his daughter rate a tattoo, but this woman he is very quickly head over heels for does. Even things like his speech patterns and things he would never previously say have changed. I’m worried about him, and I’m worried that a relationship that changes him so quickly and has him out of contact with his family isn’t a healthy one.
Should I butt out and just wait and hope he contacts me or another family member at some point? Should I call his local police department to do a well-person check? He has a history of being attracted to Crazy, and after his past few relationships I feel very protective of him.
Signed,
Is This Because He’s The Middle Child?
Dear Middle,
This doesn’t say “middle child” to me. Child-ish, sure; the not responding to calls or texts, the 4eva thinking behind the tattoo (and obviously I’ve got nothing against tats, but ink that’s about other people and not about you is often ink you’re going to be covering in 18-24 months), it’s all a little us-against-the-world adolescent to me. The middle kids I know are responsible and even. This is the opposite.
At the same time, he has two ex-wives and a kid, and I don’t think I have all the information I need about that. Is either of his exes the capital-C Crazy you referred to? Does he struggle with mental illness at all? What exactly happened there that you would feel “protective” of an adult, one old enough to have gotten married and divorced twice already? Is there something to do with substance abuse that you haven’t mentioned? Because something about the situation — the forced-seeming bubbliness you mentioned, his unresponsiveness, his seeming only to have any use for her — reads like he’s using, and the isolating effects of same. He’s not getting in touch because he’s ashamed, or just doesn’t want to hear it, about anything; she’s his whole world because she doesn’t give him shit about using, nobody else understands him, blah blah junkie logic.
I don’t mean to cast aspersions, obviously; maybe he’s just a dick and everything’s fine, what do I know. The term “well-person check” makes me think you think something a little darker is going on, though, and it’s one thing for him to cut himself off from y’all if Christmas went shittily, but if that’s the case, you didn’t mention it. He’s just decided to become a different person, one who doesn’t want to communicate with his family anymore. That happens for a few reasons. One of them is sophomore year of college. Another one is narcotics.
So, what’s next? Well, get in touch with him some way that lets you verify he saw/received the communication — email, FB wall, registered letter, whatever. Tell him you don’t need a punched timecard or anything, but when he doesn’t respond at all, it worries you and it upsets Mom and could he please let you know he got this/heard this/whatever. You love him, you hope he’s okay, he can reach out anytime. You can think that the radio silence is rude and bullshitty (…it is), but keep the thought to yourself right now and focus on ascertaining whether he’s okay, then letting him know you’re there for him if he’s not.
But with that said, if you don’t get an answer, but you can verify that he’s alive/not in trouble, then you leave it. I don’t know what’s really going on; neither do you. Maybe he’s on a season-long bender; maybe he just needs some space from his family of origin; maybe it’s both. Again, that word “protective” gives me pause, because he’s grown, and you can’t keep giving him help he didn’t ask for. He’s going to learn to stop with the kookoo ladies, or he’s not. He’s going to figure out that blowing people off has consequences, or he’s not. I get that you’re concerned, but he’s his own job, not yours, and perhaps it’s time to let concern give way to annoyance at his common-courtesy fail, and follow the “check up on” with a little good old-fashioned “rip a strip off of.”
Tags: the fam
Hey, OP here! We heard from him about 2 weeks after I sent this e-mail. He and GF moved cross-country for GF’s career, and Brother is hopeful he can get a job actually using his skills and BFA degree. I’m confident he doesn’t use anything harder than marijuana (we have another brother who is a recovering/recovered addict, so I feel like it would be easier to spot, maybe?) Most of my concern stems from his desire to be The Guy That Saves The Girl, hence the two Crazy with a capitol Unmedicated ex wives.
So since he’s been in contact, he said that he needed to take a step back, figure out what he wanted, and how to do it. It doesn’t change my concern that he’s attached himself to a flighty maybe-Crazy, but I’m glad he seems to be happy.
Maybe this is just a reaction to some drama llama-ness going on in my own family, but a family member who would “call his local police department to do a well-person check” on a grown adult when you know from Facebook that he’s actually fine and is just choosing not to talk to you for whatever reason… seems like a pretty good family member to not want to talk to.
Whew! Thank goodness he’s all right, but that’s a pretty major life decision to make on the fly, so keep up with the friendly check-ins. Even when things are going fine, it can be so easy to let ties slip, and if he’s got a history with high-maintenance partners he’ll need to know there’s a back door.
I did a stint of radio silence with my fam once. It really was just me wanting to get their voices out of my head while I worked on stuff. This was before social media, so I just let the machine pick up the calls and that was that. For a while, I couldn’t even stand to deliver a ‘yep, I’m fine’ message – I just wanted solitude. Mature? Prob not. Did me a world of good, however, and after a time, I reconnected healthily. A ‘wellness check’ on me, however, would have been wildly unwelcome and would have delayed (or prevented? maybe) said reconnection.
Sometimes “leave me in peace” is a complete sentence, even if it’s not said out loud.
OP: Most of my concern stems from his desire to be The Guy That Saves The Girl,
Oh, Jesus, *that* complex. I have any number of friends with varying degrees of that, and…
…there’s not really much to be done, alas. They say you can’t fix crazy, and that may or may not be true, but you *really* can’t fix wanting crazy, and they don’t make SSRIs for that shit.
I’m not related to any of the dudes in question, but I’ve taken up a policy: one “we’re your friends and we’re concerned” talk, and then…vaya con dios, buddy. Hope I see you on the other side.
We had a family member who was the nicest kid until he started dating this one girl. The next thing we knew, he was a profane, nasty, entitled brat who got thrown out of the house when his stepfather wouldn’t tolerate his attitude towards his mother for one more day.
He was eventually allowed back, but the pattern continued. He ended up marrying the worst of them all – manipulative doesn’t begin to cover it. She’s a malignant narcissist who actually looks for ways (sometimes illegal) to cause trouble where there is none. It’s hard to tell if he was always this way and she just brought it out, or what. But he was such a sweet kid, and now he’s such a rotten adult. It got to the point where we had to cut that branch of the family off completely.
I don’t know that your situation is that bad – I certainly hope not – but I’m obviously biased on this one. Hopefully it’s just as some other posters have said – he just needs time to do his thing, whatever that may be.
My little brother has this savior drive as well. From my current perspective in the midst of a bunch of family drama, just hope that he doesn’t get crazy knocked up.
I’m surprised no one has raised the possibility that this is an abusive relationship. The way his behavior has changed so much and he’s isolating from his family, plus sounding like someone with a weak will/self-esteem of his own historically, make me wonder. (And by this reading, the fact that he moved away with the girlfriend is not relieving at all.) This may be an instance where reversing the genders makes the situation look startlingly different…
I still don’t think there’s much more the OP can do, but I’d take her concerns more seriously and maintain extra effort to keep a line of communication with the brother, as much as possible being a non-judgmental support that he can turn to if/when he’s ready to leave.
I’m 90% certain I read this idea in an old Vine: that nice men who date awful women may not actually be that nice. It was one of those letters about “our friend’s wife is really mean to everyone and he just lets her act that way but he’s so nice” — and Sars’s response was “are you sure he’s not enjoying it?”
It may be that he just didn’t want to be a responsible sort of person for a while and his new girlfriend was okay with that, and he was aware on a subconscious level that he could get away with it by being in a new relationship.
Also, when I hear someone has “a history of being attracted to Crazy,” I think two things: one is “obvious savior complex,” which you mentioned, but the other is “common denominator.” How crazy were these other women before he came along, I wonder? If he regularly pulled stuff on the same level as “not letting your family know you’re not dead,” that wouldn’t be conducive to their emotional stability.
All this is to say that she could be a master manipulator with a strong influence over your brother’s behavior, or that he could just have some innate jerk tendencies that crop up from time to time, which may have a negative effect on his partners. Or some of both — she recognizes and actively encourages his inner jerk because it fits well with her inner jerk. But I wouldn’t worry too much about his being helpless in the clutches of a conniving woman, or anything along those lines.
When you met the girlfriend at Christmas and she rubbed you the wrong way, it is entirely possible that you and your family rubbed her the wrong way also. Chalk it up to different personalities. You say she was charming but “acting.” If you thought she wasn’t being genuine then I bet she probably was getting a non-friendly vibe from you. Brother probably got an earful afterwards about his stone-cold family. His distance may be a combination of him appeasing her and agreeing with her about how she was received at Christmas.
I also think that requesting the police to do a wellness check when you know the person is alive and well is creating drama out of thin air.