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Boyfriends brother doesnt buy groceries
natomi
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
I don’t know what to do. My boyfriends brother eats all the food but does not buy groceries.
So my boyfriends parents buy groceries for the family. They buy food that I hardly ever eat. They’re alllll ready meals, expired food ( they buy reduced items) and sooo much junk food. So My boyfriend and I go out and buy our own food.
I don’t mind if the parents eat our food , because Im staying at their place and I used their condiments and what not.
BUT my boyfriends brother.. eats all of the food In the house! He never buy groceries!! I don’t want to sound stingy or anything ... but he has a better job than I do.. and food is expensive where I live! Idk how to approach this problem.. am I being greedy?? ..
So my boyfriends parents buy groceries for the family. They buy food that I hardly ever eat. They’re alllll ready meals, expired food ( they buy reduced items) and sooo much junk food. So My boyfriend and I go out and buy our own food.
I don’t mind if the parents eat our food , because Im staying at their place and I used their condiments and what not.
BUT my boyfriends brother.. eats all of the food In the house! He never buy groceries!! I don’t want to sound stingy or anything ... but he has a better job than I do.. and food is expensive where I live! Idk how to approach this problem.. am I being greedy?? ..
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Also, move out.
I think you can do better.
like; you could approach it along the lines of; hey, I bought this and that food for this and that purpose, but then when I wanted to go eat it, it was already gone.
There just might be the normal expectation that food in the house is for people to eat. As I assume this is the home of your boyfriends parents, where you live with his siblings. and groceries have always been bought for the family.
without a conversation with the brother, or with everyone, you won't get to the expectations you and other people have over what's available in the house, and what you can do to circumvent it. be it with a mini-fridge for personal stuff, or a more general grocery shopping list that people are expected to take care off.
That all said, its still possible that the parents decide that food in the house is family food, and if you can't live with that, its time to look at other options.
I actually thought about this a good deal, and "move out" is really the only answer here.
Literally all of these options and suggestions, including the mini-fridge, are just going to lead to the appearance of "I don't want to share with the household that is letting me live here" and thus create bad blood and force them to eventually need to move out. These sorts of problems don't resolve themselves unless all parties have equal power under a lease, which will never be the power dynamic here.
So moving out is really the only way to make this an actual solution, rather than a stopgap for a few months until something else happens they don't like due to living under someone else's roof with another dependant.
And this is a post elaborating your thinking in a useful way. Do this. Do not come into a thread, drop eight characters including a space, and hit post. Do better than that.
This is likely an unfair situation to you, especially if you are paying rent, but as has been said you are the non family member, and your needs are secondary to the needs of the family. The only person who may prioritize you is your boyfriend, and that is a tenuous prospect at best. So you need to decide how much money you are spending on food, how much extra you spend because of the brother, and how much extra you will spend if you and your boyfriend get a new place.
The lower number prevails. Is it fair? Not really, if they are charging you full freight on rent, then move. If you aren't paying rent, then that's your cost for moving in.
In either case, I would let your boyfriend deal with his family and not you. There are all kinds of things that can happen and none of them are positive.
If he's unwilling to get involved, or doesn't think you're being treated unfairly, then it becomes a question of whether you think the current arrangement is worth the price of extra groceries. If it is, then just start counting your bf's brother when buying groceries and deal with it. And try to find some kind of a positive angle so that the issue doesn't piss you off as much. I mean, you're buying healthier food than his parents, so in a way this is humanitarian work. :biggrin:
Otherwise, yeah, moving out becomes the only rational option.
Good advice is often succinct. A post seeking advice can be long because it contains a lot of extraneous info or is ruminating unhealthily. A short post is often the best response to that kind of post.
Okay how about this. When I make an H/A thread asking how I should moderate this forum I'll @ you first.
if offering you differing perspectives on what good advice consists of is problematic i'll take my ban now. if the mods had a monopoly on knowing what good advice consists of, we wouldn't need other participants here, the mods could just answer all the questions themselves.
Succinct advice is great when it's self explanatory or blatantly obvious as to why that would be the best route to go. For example: "Lawyer up", "Go to the dentist", "See a doctor", all pretty self explanatory.
In this case, "Move out" without the further explanation of "Because stop gap methods will only work until something else goes wrong, and something else will go wrong" isn't self explanatory, and seems like a rather extreme bit of advice for "My boyfriends brother eats our food".
But, if this is the hill you want to stand on, you do you.
After thinking about it, I agree with Ceres and don't really want you speaking for me on this. The short post can be easily misread as pithy or snarky rather than as the well meaning but brief I intended. The context does help frame it to make sure the tone and meaning gets through as intended.
Sure - not trying to speak for you, i independently agreed with your first post. One of the points of offering differing perspectives on advice is that one viewpoint may win out as a thread takes its course. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to be able to offer differing views.