“My friend is in a long distance relationship. Should my friend’s fiancé set on the phone with his mom for hours while they spend time?”

CASSIE

Welcome to My Counselor Online. I’m Cassie and today one of our awesome counselors is going to answer your question. So let’s go find out what MyCounselor Says.

JOSH

Welcome to My Counselor Online. I’m Josh Spurlock and today I’m answering a question for Louise, who has a friend that’s in a long-distance relationship and wants to know: “Should my friends fiancé set on the phone with his mom for hours while they spend time together?”

Further Information Needing Consideration…

So, there’s a few pieces of information that are really helpful in knowing how to answer this question. For example, how old is your friend? Additionally, what are the ages of the others involved in these dynamics? And are we talking about a single occurrence or a few times of spending some time together as a family in order to get to know each other and to get to know each other’s’ family in a long-distance type format?

Are we talking about every time we connect? Where we are frequently spending extended amounts of time where there’s not space for individual relationship development?

So What IS Normal?

So first of all, it would be pretty normal for couples who are wanting to get to know each other over the course of a distance to maybe spend some time via video or phone getting to know each other, getting to know each other’s family, especially for younger couples or if we’re still living at home.

That would not be an uncommon thing at all, and really a healthy thing for getting to know each other in the same sort of way that if we lived in the same city we might get together for dinner out someplace to get to know each other in more depth.

However, there can be situations where adults are not individually dating or taking the space to be their own person, apart from their family, no way that allows them to relate and have relationship individually of their family of origin with the person who they are looking to pursue relationship and possibly marriage with. And therefore, moving towards leaving and cleaving and forming with them an adult relationship, apart from their family.

That kind of dynamic, which sometimes additionally can be fostered by families who struggle with codependency and lack of independence, isn’t healthy and can create some real difficulties as they try to move into married life and independence as adults.

CASSIE

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