They're engaged? Really?

Pretty sure they haven't thought this through.

Confront the fish. Image by Chatgpt

Last week, while preparing for guests, I planned a menu around a dish with raw fish. I knew I’d need to buy sushi-grade, for safety, but I put off figuring out where I could get it.

I picked up everything else and made the other dishes. I remembered I had to solve this problem about the sushi-grade. But it was going to be a headache, so I let it slide til the very last minute.

Surprise! The fish was not available for love or money.

I was definitely severe with myself as I regrouped. But I didn’t give myself too hard a time. I knew the stakes had been low. The only one I’d inconvenienced was myself.

I’m pretty sure lots of people do this sometimes, but usually it’s like the fish: not that big a deal. Today, though, we’ll consider a letter to Carolyn Hax from a woman who put off the hard part when the stakes were about as high as they could get. Spoiler alert: The column’s headline is “With baby coming, can fiancé’s traumatic family story stay buried?”

The letter-writer is seven months pregnant “with my fiancé’s and my first child.” Her fiance’s brother is a registered sex offender who’s in prison for felony indecency with a child. Now he’s about to get released—just as she and her fiancé are moving in together.

Her fiancé has apparently been housing his brother’s belongings, because now he wants to rent a storage unit for them, and that’s precipitated a crisis. The LW neither wants to house the stuff, nor spend money on it. Nor, in fact, does she want the brother involved in their child’s life, or, really, their own, either. If he wants his brother to have a “significant” role in their family life, she doesn’t want to marry him or raise their child together.

Yet when she asks her fiancé “what boundaries, if any,” he expects to erect between their family and his brother, he “becomes irritated and shuts down the conversation.”

Let’s make sure we got all that. She’s not saying she’d be really upset; she’s saying the wedding, and even co-parenting, are off. She doesn’t want, she writes, to “discover after we’re married and raising a child together that we have fundamentally different views on protecting our family.”

Carolyn agrees the child has to come first. She also says it’s time the LW got better informed about her fiancé’s traumatic childhood (he and his brother were in foster care). Finally, she recommends therapy all around. AdviceObsessed thinks she’s right about all that.

But that’s where Carolyn stops, and I think I get why. The LW is already seven months into a pregnancy with a man about whom she knows dangerously little. Since she’s finally asking the right questions, Carolyn might have felt unkind saying she should have asked those questions, oh, eight months ago.

Maybe, too, Carolyn thought it was mean to query “fiancé.” Fiancé means “engaged,” or it’s supposed to, anyway. Yet the LW is sitting on a big unasked question, knowing the wrong answer would be not just a marital headache, but a marital dealbreaker.

So how can she say she’s engaged, with that dealbreaker hanging out there unanswered? This matter of the brother didn’t just come up. She has to have known about it before she got pregnant, so saying she’s engaged is like saying “It’s okay, because I’m going to serve sushi-grade fish,” when you haven’t ascertained such fish is out there.

Except this is not a fish. It’s a marriage and a baby. And the LW is locking the barn door after the horse has gone far, far away, and about this, Carolyn says nothing.

An advice columnist writes for her readers, as well as her letter-writers. AdviceObsessed knows lots and lots of people get pregnant without first resolving huge issues like this one. Maybe Carolyn’s silence on this point was a blown opportunity to do them some good.