Hello. I'm here seeking support as I put my 8 month relationship behind me with a dad of two girls, one almost 16 and and the other almost 21. He ended up breaking up with me out of the blue without any explanation and has now gone silent. But with a bit of distance from things, I see now that he unwittingly did me a huge favor because this relationship was almost certainly going to crash and burn due to his lack of boundaries and dysfunction with his kids and ex. Nobody ever warned me about the problems with step daughters. I was super naive about how things would play out and I thought they'd be glad to have a positive female figure in their lives and for their dad, especially since their lifestyles would have been improved with me in the picture. I could have paid for vacations and college and all sorts of things that he struggles to provide for them on his own.

Their mom is a serious loser. She was having an affair with a married man when my BF met and married her, unbeknownst to him. About 10 years later she left him for her latest Affair Partner. She has lived with a series of skanky boyfriends for the past 8 years or so since their divorce. She currently lives in a small and scruffy apartment leased by her boyfriend and the girls sleep on the couch in his living room when they're with her. She was a SAHM while they were married and hasn't been able to hold a job since the divorce and so she depends on mulitple boyfriends and her parents to cover her living expenses. (She blew through her divorce settlement instead of buying a new house or getting herself trained up with job skills.) She has taught the girls that they don't need to become financially self-sufficient because men will pay for them. Neither parent disciplines the kids or holds them to any standards. My ex BF is literally afraid that if he pushes them they will revolt and "leave him" to go live at their mom's place.The older one has been essentially vacationing in another country and staying with her mom's family there for the past year. She dropped out of community college and doesn't have a full time job. And now he's paying for her to fly here for a vacation for a few months. The other is barely passing her classes in high school, none of which are the college track challenging ones, and she skips school whenever she can. She once claimed twice in a month that she couldn't go to school because of menstrual cramps! When she does something super basic like puts her dirty dishes into the sink (not even washing them, just placing them there) she tries to get her dad to transfer money into her account as a reward, and what's worse is that he often will do it. Every month the 15-yr-old gets about $200 for pocket money plus all the extra money he gives her for unhealthy snacks. (Her diet is disgusting and she pretty much is on track for a heart attack or gallbladder removal by 35, and she's already obese.)

I'm divorced with a well adjusted full time college student who is making good progress in his degree. We cover this school tuition/housing/books and so on with his college savings fund but require him to work so that he has skin in the game and learns the value of money. I live in a much nicer neighborhood and in a much nicer and larger house than my ex-BF does. I also earn more than twice as much as he does. 

The ex BF stupidly asked the girls how they'd feel if he were to move in with me and eventually marry me. Of course, they said no way. It doesn't take an idiot to see that I wasn't going to let them get away with their slothful behavior, especially given that I didn't raise my own son that way if I were a fixture in their lives and they were living under my roof. Rather than rock their boat, he chose to end the relationship with me. I don't know if he consciously sees that this is what happened, but it is very clear to me that he felt we didn't align since the only way things could work between us would be if he grew a backbone and told them they'd need to shape up. He has a ton of guilt over the divorce as well as baggage from his own childhood about being abandoned by his parents. Anything that seems like he's not putting his girls first = abandonment in his mind, even if it would actually benefit them. He's a very hard working and ambitious type, like me, and I think that's part of why he was so drawn to me. His daughters didn't get any of that though. They're just like their mom, lazy users. He and I talked a lot about starting a business together doing the same work he does now, but striking out on his own. I would have been happy to use my resources to get that business off the ground, which would have enabled him to be much happier with his career and would have brought in more money. But I wouldn't be willing to do that if he wasn't "partnered" with me fully and sharing a home and life. I think that he saw the fork in the road before I did, or he at least felt it and this made him turn away from me and break up. 

I guess I'm writing in the hope that people here will confirm that ending this relationship was really for the better. He and I had a phenomenal connection and were really great for one another in many ways. But ultimately, he wasn't willing to do the things to enable us to get closer and deepen the relationship. For example, the younger daughter was allowed to call the shots on a whim with respect to which parent's house she was staying at on any given night, and she mainly chose to be at his house on weekends, which meant that he could never come to my house and spend the night. (His work starts super early M-F so we couldn't really socialize much during the work week.) I'm sorry, but it's just crazy that two adults in their 50s are not allowed to sleep together at the woman's house because of a teen's preference. We would often have to cancel plans and even travel plans if she decided she'd be at his house that night at the last minute, and he allowed that to happen. The few times he did take a trip out of town with me she'd call screaming that he cared more about his girlfriend than her and had left her behind, even though we'd both invited her to join us but she'd refused. I read so much advice about how you shouldn't opine on or judge how someone you're dating raises their kids, so I didn't feel like I should say anything. To this day, he doesn't know how insane I think his family situation is.

Oh, and his "solution" that he'd offer me whenever he realized that the status quo wasn't cool was that he will wash his hands of them when the youngest turns 18. Except he never addressed the fact that she isn't on a "go away to college" track and would have no way to earn enough to live on her own. And how was he going to tell the younger one he wasn't going to support her beyond age 18 when he's still doing the bidding of the one who is already 21?! Whenever I'd ask these questions he or even some of my friends would tell me to stop rushing things because we hadn't been together long enough to consider moving in yet anyhow. I didn't want to move in immediately. I just wanted him to be willing to visit me and spend the night like normal adults in a romantic relationship do. I didn't want to be the only one packing a bag and leaving my pets behind in order to spend time together. And I wanted to know that when the time came that we were ready to consider living together, there would be an open pathway for that to happen.