Auntie, stop thinking about getting back together with your daughter. Let her live on with her new husband.

(From a reader submission. Images in this article are from the internet.)

Auntie, stop thinking about getting back together with your daughter. Let her live on with her new husband.

Without comparison, you cannot find the gap, nor can you discover the harm. Whether it is people or things, you have to find a point of reference. I finally understand that now. It is just that before I understood this principle, I paid a considerable price for it. I was badly hurt, my vitality was greatly damaged, and even now I still feel lingering fear and have not fully recovered.

Everyone's family of origin is different. When we are minors, we cannot choose our own family, nor do we have the ability to change our own birth and family circumstances. That is just the way it is. I once loved my ex-wife very much. I knew her family was well-off and that she had a spoiled, arrogant personality. The economic and material gap between our two families was very large. Although at that time she felt I took very good care of her, she did not care about these things either (she was the kind of woman who did not understand the importance of money, because she had never lacked it, rather than the kind of person who could endure poverty; I did not discover this point before). I considered myself unworthy of her, but I was willing to work hard for her and give her the best life. And so we got married.

The reason her family agreed was not that they thought highly of my character, but that they had no way to deal with this daughter who had been pampered since childhood, so they gave in. Therefore, even though after marriage I exhausted my own savings, and my parents also gave me all of their retirement savings to buy a new house, it still completely failed to meet my mother-in-law's requirements. But at that time she also knew this was the best I could offer. Even though she was dissatisfied, it was what her own daughter wanted, so there was nothing she could do. To prove that I was not after her family's money, at the time I did not let my parents-in-law provide a dowry. But every time she came to see my ex-wife, my mother-in-law would still say I was useless and that her daughter was suffering, and so on.

After marriage I worked desperately, wanting to prove my ability and also to give my ex-wife a better life. But just as I was striving hard, she changed her heart because I could not be by her side all the time like before marriage, and she fell for another man who courted her. I urged her to come back, but she felt I did not care about her or pay attention to her as I had before marriage. She also said that since I did not care about her, she would just find someone else willing to care about her. Hearing her such cold-blooded words, my heart died, and I finally let go. Anyway, my parents-in-law never liked me to begin with. Seeing their daughter divorce me and remarry a man who appeared to come from a better family than mine, they did not feel anything was wrong. And just like that, I have had no contact at all with my ex-wife's family for more than a year.

Now I have put all my energy into my career. My business is doing quite well, and through my own efforts I have earned myself a new life. But unexpectedly, just a few days ago, my mother-in-law, whom I had not been in contact with for a long time, suddenly came to find me. She said her new son-in-law was a man with no sense of responsibility, who only knew how to use sweet talk to coax my ex-wife into asking them for money. She said she hoped I could get back together with my ex-wife and make her leave that freeloading liar. I only found it laughable. My ex-wife and her mother are, strictly speaking, the same kind of people. They can only start from their own perspective and find reasons for all their own behavior. They never think about what harm others will suffer because of it.

What I want to do now is simply to develop my new life. I have finally, with great difficulty, walked out of the pain, and I do not want to fall into trouble again. So I told her: "Auntie, I will not get back together with your daughter. Let her live on with her new husband." Everyone, don't you think she is ridiculous?