‘My boyfriend says when we fight, he loves my son less’

“We’ve been talking about moving in together for a while, but I’m worried now that he’ll start treating my son differently,” the mum says.

Eloise was worried her boyfriend would start mistreating her son. Photo: iStock

Arguing in a relationship is pretty normal.

It’s how we let off steam, how we sort out disagreements, and how we get in really mean zingers when we’re feeling petty (kidding about that last one… that’s not healthy).

But when two people are having a disagreement and one person drags the kids into things, that’s when it gets really messy.

For a few months, Eloise* has been thinking about moving in with her partner Tom, but recently something made her stop in her tracks: Tom told her that when she and he argue, it changes the way he feels about Eloise’s little boy.

“He said to me tonight after a fight that every time we argue, it affects how he feels towards my son,” she explained in a Reddit post.

“Most of our fights (very small ones) are about my son, but I can’t understand why he would say this and it’s a major red flag.”

Tom has made similar comments on a couple of occasions, and although Eloise has closely watched them interacting after the arguments, she doesn’t see Tom behaving differently towards the boy.

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Eloise was worried her boyfriend would start mistreating her son. Photo: iStock

Mum sees red flag when boyfriend questions love for child

She said that her son is a good boy and that Tom seems to agree, in spite of what he said in the heat of the argument.

“My son is a great kid. Well-behaved and honestly has made being a mum a dream. Tom even says so… he always talks about my son with pride.”

Eloise also revealed that she and Tom don’t see eye-to-eye on parenting, and he often says that she’s not strict enough with the child.

But she’s always been proud of the way she’s brought up her son as a single mum.

“I talk to him like he’s an adult, and when he’s getting angry, he goes to a favourite spot to regulate his emotions and then we talk about what happened,” she said.

“Sometimes this doesn’t work and I know it’s been built up from school so I just say, ‘Do you need a hug?’ and he melts in my arms and calms down.”

“My boyfriend thinks I’m soft, and that I should put him straight in his room when he does wrong. I say that I always get compliments about how kind and well-behaved he is, so why change something that isn’t broken?”

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Reddit weighs in on mums dilemma with boyfriend and son

One person shared a worst-case-scenario story of when her mum was a single mum, and then got remarried.

“My older brother was from my mum’s first marriage and to this day my father doesn’t really consider him his son, despite meeting him at four years-old,” she wrote. “My mum chose to prioritise her relationship with my father over her relationship with my brother and when he went through normal rebellious developmental stages, it ended up with him being kicked from the house and dead in the streets by 26.

“I would deeply reconsider moving in together with your boyfriend.”

Many believed the answer was clear.

“It’s so manipulative, to make his love for your son contingent upon your relationship,” one person said. “This is just code for, ‘if you make trouble, I’ll mistreat your child’. Dump him.”

“Everyone else is explaining,” said another. “I’m going to cut to the chase. DUMP HIM.”

*Names have been changed

Originally published as ‘My boyfriend says when we fight, he loves my son less’