An e-mail from a mother about her daughter's boyfriend

Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from a mother who's worried about her daughter:

Dear GB,

I don't know if you will help me out with this. I hope that you will. I am very innocent to all this. My daughter has a boyfriend and they have a 2 month old child. She works full time and he plays with a job here and there. She pays for the apartment and he's not even on the lease. But this is not so much my concern. My concern is that lately I have been coming over to pick up my granddaughter, and her boyfriend is hanging out with two friends that are gay. He spends all his free time with them, and even brings them on dates with her.

This weekend he and my daughter went to a movie and her boyfriend brought these two friends along. (Incidentally, she owns the car. He doesn't even have a driver's license).

She and I and the baby went out today and when we arrived he was there with these two gay friends and I got very upset. I told her that I thought her boyfriend must either be gay or bi-sexual. She said that they are just his friends and her boyfriend is absolutely not gay. We had a big argument over this.

Please advise. Do straight men generally hang out with gay men on a daily basis? I have nothing against gays as I have many friends and a few relatives who are and I love them. I just don't want this jerk using my daughter financially and also lying about his sexuality.

I would appreciate your opinion on this.

Thanks, Anne

Having thought about this a bit now, I reckon the issue of the boyfriend's sexuality isn't the main question. Surely the question is simply "Why is the boyfriend spending so much time with his friends when he only became a father two months ago"? None of the possible answers to this question are likely to be good for Anne's daughter.

All fathers that I know spend a lot of time helping their partner looking after their newly born babies, all the more so if it's their first child as seems likely in this case. But if he spends all his free time with his friends, it sounds like Anne's daughter has both the financial burden of supporting the family, as well as most of the daily burden of caring for a newly born child.

I can only really imagine this happening if he doesn't really care about his girlfriend or his baby. However just because he has gay friends, and even if he sees a lot of them, that's no indication that he himself is gay in my opinion. In that situation, if a guy who had recently become a father thought that he might be gay or bisexual, I think the most likely behaviour would be to investigate his sexuality secretly rather than in public. On the other hand guys who are very comfortable with their heterosexuality often have no issue with other guys being gay, so given that Anne's daughter's boyfriend recently became a father it seems most likely to me that he falls into this category.

From Anne's description, the boyfriend sounds like a complete waste of space though. On the basis that he drifts from job to job he doesn't seem to have much interest in his own future. And by spending time with his friends rather than his partner and their new baby, it sounds like he doesn't have much interest in his family's future either. It also sounds like he's even been too lazy to learn to drive.

One can only wonder what Anne's daughter sees in this guy? Perhaps I've been watching too many soaps on TV, but it could be a case where the daughter purposefully chose a boyfriend that her parents would disapprove of, just to prove that she was in charge of her own life. Having put herself in this situation, she could well be in denial about the reality of it all, and is still hoping that everything will work out in the end somehow. Given the attitude of the boyfriend though, that seems unlikely to me at the moment. On the other hand, even if Anne's daughter does realise that she's made a mistake having a child with this guy, she probably won't want to admit the mistake to her parents.

Whether Anne's daughter realises the problem yet or not, I think she's likely to need the support of her parents to help with her child at some point. Hopefully they'll be there for her when she does need them. My guess is that they will be. Anne's daughter may not realise it yet, but it's clear to me that Anne really cares about her daughter. Otherwise, she wouldn't have bothered to send me an e-mail in the first place.

Do any readers have any other thoughts?