agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have been with my wife, “Madison,” for seven years, married for four, and for the entirety of the time I have known her, she has always sought the approval of her older sister “Crystal.” Crystal is keenly aware of this and takes full advantage of it. Madison is always willing to drop everything when her sister needs something, be that watching her kids at a moment’s notice so she can have a night out, letting her borrow clothes, or taking time away from things we like to do or her own activities so she can help Crystal grade papers (Crystal is a teacher). Crystal, however, never reciprocates.

The last straw for me was when my SIL decided on a whim that she wanted to go to a movie with her friends and called—on our anniversary!—asking if she could “pretty please” drop off her kids with us for the night because the movie was going to get out late. This was less than half an hour before my wife and I were to leave for dinner at a restaurant where we had to make a reservation nearly six months in advance. The babysitter we’d hired to watch our 10-month-old had already arrived. Madison started to agree, but I grabbed the phone and told Crystal our plans (which she was well aware of), said that she was out of luck, and hung up. Madison was upset and it cast a pall over the entire evening.

The next day she said she had spoken to her sister, and Crystal was demanding an apology from me. I refused and finally told my wife what I thought of her sister. I asked her why she keeps allowing herself and us to be used by her. Now she is pissed at ME! What can I do to get her to see what a self-serving bitch her sister is?

—Take Off the Blinders

Dear Take Off,

I totally get why you’re frustrated with your sister-in-law’s thoughtless and entitled behavior. And unless you actually called her a self-serving bitch on the phone, I don’t think you owe her an apology. But it sounds like you then turned around and took a lot of your frustration out on your wife. Instead of focusing on Crystal’s actions, you turned this into a fight between you and Madison.

Of course, Madison bears some responsibility for the dynamic. But did you really think that attacking her for “allowing herself to be used” was going to convince her to listen to you? You can’t force your wife to feel as you do or stop loving her sister. And there is also no way (at least, no ethical way) for you to control who she keeps in her life or how she behaves with Crystal.

If I were you, I’d stop blaming Madison for “allowing” this to happen. Try to speak calmly and civilly to her about it—you could start by asking her what she wants, or feels she might deserve, from her relationship with her sister. If you’ve never been honest with her about how Crystal’s demands have affected you as well, it is probably important for Madison to know that—but without turning it into a lecture or an attack. It can be very hard to change lifelong patterns of communication and behavior. If you really want something to change, I think the first step is trying to actually understand where your wife is coming from and what she wants from this relationship.

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So, the actual question here is "What can I do to get her to see what a self-serving bitch her sister is?" and the only honest answer, as always, is "You can't. You cannot change other people's minds for them."

What LW ought to have done is start talking, in less polarizing terms, about the effect of SIL's little requests on their marriage. And if LW had been doing that all along then probably this blow-up would not have happened.

But LW hasn't done that, and that is why everything is screwed up. So, in conclusion, don't fucking wait seven years to tell people things!

And try not to insult people they love aloud unless they do so first (and even then be careful).

It is really NOT OK for a teacher to have a random person (ie, not another teacher hired by the school) to do grading, even if it’s “simple” multiple choice questions.

I know, this isn’t the point of the letter, but that part took me aback.

I did some grading as a parent volunteer in my kids' elementary school classes. Just worksheets, not essays or anything.

To me that falls into a different category than "random person in the teacher's life." The school knows you are their volunteer; if there's a problem with the grading they know where they can talk to you about it.

^This.

I'm pretty sure that's a FERPA violation, actually.

Maybe not.

I used to occasionally grade multiple-choice quizzes for my parents when I was a kid. It would definitely feel over the line to give them to random people and it's probably not ethically completely pure but it's pretty common for family members to help with the simple grading that wouldn't have any personal information. Because teachers are expected to do about twenty hours worth of work a day.

In a previous job, I was an admin for an undergraduate science department, and one of the profs asked me to grade a multiple choice quiz. I was told by my department chair in no uncertain terms that this was not a task I should ever be doing for the profs, that it was on them to do their own grading.

I know that teachers are overworked, but outsourcing parts of the job without the workplace being aware of it is problematic.

Everything about teaching is problematic tbh. But that wasn't about whether it's appropriate for profs to get help with grading - that was whether was appropriate for them to *ask the admin*, and it absolutely wasn't, because you had other work you were paid to do. (I guarantee any of them that didn't have TAs to do it for them were asking spouses and partners to help if they had them at least occasionally, and this was widely known.) And that's in a university.

In American public schools, everybody is 100% aware that teachers break labor law when grading, if only by doing it while unpaid - by contract, they're technically only supposed to work during the hours they're paid to be in the building (and get paid extra for coaching, etc.) If they do this, the entire system falls apart - working to their paid hours only according to the contract is the main strike tactic they have, and when they do that they don't do any grading at all, usually, because they don't have *time*.

I did have the time to do the grading. Actually, I’d done most of it by the time the chair realized what the prof had asked. (None of the profs in that department had TAs.)

Edited 2025-05-20 19:11 (UTC)

It’s possible LW is in a queer relationship, in which case LW is a woman calling another woman a self-serving bitch. I still don’t like that. But if LW is a man (statistically, most relationships are different-sex), a man calling a woman a bitch gets my hackles up in a whole different way. If LW had said “self-serving vulture” or something it wouldn’t have bothered me, but a woman being flat-out called a bitch in an advice column made my sympathy for LW disappear. It instantly went from “SIL is an asshole” to “you’re both assholes.”

This reminds me of a situation polyamorous folks can get into where multiple partners are demanding the attention of one person who is inexplicably unable to clone themself. We used to sometimes call it “squeaky wheel polyamory.”