So as the title says, I’m engaged to an absolutely wonderful man. He is smart, really good looking, healthy and fit. Literally the dream man.
We met in the US and started dating there. He’s from Europe and had lived in the uk for a period of time for school and university before moving for a big job in finance here. I work in the education sector (relevant later).
He’s always boasted about working very hard to get this high paying job and how hard his life was since school to get to where he is. We’ve been dating for five years, a few months after he got his first job.
However, since we met there’s been a few signs that his life has been a lot more fortunate than he lets on. Even when he was a grad and not making any more than me, he always invited me for meals. He also always had some expensive looking ingredients in his house and lived in a fairly nice apartment in an expensive city.
He also had nice watches. Now I don’t know anything about watches but one of my friends is really into them and apparently he has a couple that my friend’s dad couldn’t afford until he was in his 40s. My fiance claims they’re presents.
All of this was fine until we went to his home country for the first time. I’d met his family and fell in love with them several times when they invited us to really nice trips several times but when we went to his actual house, I was shocked.
He lived in a massive villa with a swimming pool, he apparently had a live in nanny growing up, his parents joked about how he liked certain very expensive foods from a very young age, his dad was wearing a fitted suit most dinners and they brought a personal chef for a few of our dinners (he proposed to me there a few months ago so his parents knew it was a big deal). His dad also had a wide selection of vintage wines and whiskeys. He opened a bottle of wine after I said yes and said it was the most expensive in his collection.
The big thing I learned while there though is that unlike what I assumed, my boyfriend did not get a scholarship to a random school in the U.K. but literally was in one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the world (there are a couple of U.K. PMs who also went there). I looked up the fees and they were around 50,000 USD per year. I also learned that one of the founders of the financial isnitrution he works in also went there.
So obviously he had a lot of help. Nothing wrong with that but I challenged him when we went back about his whole I’m self made speeches. He got extremely defensive and said he still worked extremely hard to get to where he is.
The problem is he keeps saying this in front of me and my colleagues and friends. None of us had parents who could dream of affording a boarding school when we were kids. None of us had parents who taught us about expensive food and wine so we can sit and have successful business meetings. None of us had watches and fitted suits that also gave us an advantage in these big interviews. He had all of that on a silver spoon.
I tried to ignore it but he made a bunch of school friends of mine recently and they were asking him how he made it all the way to the USA from where he is and how he became this successful . He went on again with his self made speech and I just blew off at him telling him he is privileged and while he worked hard, he really needs to acknowledge that before talking.
He, in turn, got angry at me and told me many people are privileged and don’t make it and that he’s not gonna start off every introduction with someone by saying “I only did this because of mommy and daddy”.
How can I explain to him that he’s very hurtful by purposefully ignoring the privilege he has and making people around him feel bad?
TLDR; fiance hid certain truths about his childhood from me and keeps pretending to have made it himself. This is causing me to have resentment
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He is ungrateful. Like it is good he didn’t waste the opportunities he has been given. But he is not self made…
I am also not self made, I had a similar upbringing to him and I understand that has given me an advantage in life and with that comes some responsibility. My brother had the same as me and has never had a job so yeh… I could have done that… I guess…
But I am not a martyr because I worked hard on top of my privilege. There are actually real self made people in this world who went from 0 to 100. Those people are fantastic people and should get our respect.
I feel like your partner is disrespecting the real people who actually are self made.
I would invite him to my parents flat. 9m2 room shared by my sister and myself. One desk, the other one had to do their homework at the kitchen table. I don’t think my parents ever drank wine at home. Beer yes but wine. And to show him the public school I went to. Not bad or unhealthy just normal. Often people can just understand if they see it with their own eyes.
Your situation screams Bourdieu to me 😅 Have you read his theories about capital forms, habitus and social positions?
If not, it’s an interesting read, especially when you work in education. And I’d suggest you tell him to read about it, too. People who have socioeconomic advantages and use them well by working hard tend to be literally blind to those advantages. The educational system is created to look fair, while it inherently isn’t.
Is it really a matter of you explaining better and him understanding? Maybe he is just unwilling to acknowledge his priviledges because that would require him to evolve beyond his displaced pride. Resentment towards someone this arrogant is very understandable. Is this the only thing he lacks integrity with or is there more? You pointed out his obvious lie and instead of accountability he threw a tantrum with “well Im not gonna start by telling about mommy and daddy”. Middle ground with truth about both his backround and hard work later does excist, but he actively chooses not to tell that truth to people around him. The way he treats others and is willing to compromise telling the full truth….He doesn’t sound very dreamy as human.
I don’t quite understand what the “self made” speech is about. Do you feel, he is purposefully implying he came from some sort of deject background/family?
I once dated a guy who told me white males (he is one) are the most discriminated against group. Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked him if he was serious. He absolutely was. He said he missed out on so much because of it. Like you OP, I tried to explain it to him but he was so wrapped up in his belief, he was unable to see it.
I think give him some time to process what he’s learnt. It sounds like he wraps a lot of his self worth and strength of character in his hard work. It will be confronting to him to admit that he hasn’t worked as he thought to get where he is. His privilege has blinded him to the (many, many, many) advantages he’s had. Admitting that he’s had an unwritten (and unasked for) hands up in life could be challenging for him to accept if he believes in fairness and equality. If he’s a good man, he will be struggling with this but he should come out the other side with a new view of life. There is always the possibility he will dig his heels in and continue to be an ass.
Perhaps this vide can help him
Life of privilege explained in a $100 race
Cosplaying as working class. In a vacuum I would consider him an absolute tool. Not sure what’s so great about him? All thr traits you describe are negatives. He’s nice to you because he wants you to like him. This sort of person is conversely usually very unkind to people he sees as beneath him.
In summary, he comes from a very rich background.He’s looking for a princess turn into a Queen and he’s cos playing as a working Poor so he can find “love”. Yup. Great guy.
What i mean is, you dont change this man. He changes you.
His full of himself