Reply to Best friend's husband is being ungrateful or are we wrong? WWYD?

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[quote=Anonymous]The parties involved and their faults:

Mike: Should not have lost his temper. Should not have been rude, should apologize. Likely feels quite powerless in the situation and very much dislikes the feeling of being indebted to OP. I imagine it made him more angry to get upset about this and have you and your fiance sit there cooly, seeming to judge him and then for your fiance to throw some kerosene on the fire. I think that Mike here is simply the camel who's back broke and exploded what was clearly a growing issue of contention.

Fiance: Least emotionally invested of every person in the situation yet responsible for the the escalation of the incident. Since he is your fiance and not your husband he is also probably inaccurate in including himself as a benefactor as you have likely not combined finances yet. I don't think your fiance behaved very well and I would be mad at him if I were you. But I also think he is right, you need to stop giving them money.

Anna: A mooch. She started a life she can't afford and isn't making very good decisions about how to get her life in line with what she can afford. She has allowed herself to become dependent on a friend for money and then assumed that she could involve another person (Mike) in that dependency. Anna needs to grow up and realize that this can't continue for the rest of your lives. She needs to become financially independent. She needs that for her own pride, for the health of her marriage and for the example she will set for her children. Clearly she has family that is willing to help, she needs to buckle down and figure this out.

OP: You have allowed yourself to become a benefactor. That has created a poisonous power imbalance in your relationship. Suddenly Mike cannot criticize you because you have done so much for them. That is corrosive. It means it is no longer a relationship that you all want, but a relationship that 50% of the people involved NEED. And clearly it is not totally freely given, as your fiance's comment shows. You ARE keeping track. You are so involved in their finances that you have been paying their monthly daycare bill for 3 months. For the same reason you can't become true friends with your parents until financial independence, you can't really be true friends with your friends unless you are financially independent, because if someone controls your purse strings, they have power over you. And power is not egalitarian which is what healthy friendship should be. Even here you cite your donations as proof of your moral high ground. You are being nice to a friend you love, but your kindness will destroy the friendship in the long term. Even if this weird power dynamic worked for you and Anna alone, it is NOT working for the two couples. It needs to end, and you need to stop viewing them as beneficiaries of your kindness and start viewing them as people. [/quote]

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