Thanksgiving Tug of War

• Thanksgiving mess. Social circles colliding, no one wants to give an inch. All I want to do is enjoy the holiday with my partner, who's been living far away and is home for the weekend. How can I untangle this knot? Here's the situation. My partner and I have been together for many years. He started grad school in another state this semester, and we see each other only once or twice a month. He's in town for the whole 5-day weekend coming up. The distance has been hard on us, and time together is precious. We accepted an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner a month ago. They're close friends, and they even timed their event specifically to include us. Partner has a couple of old friends (going back to high school) living in the city. He's an only child, they're the closest he has to family, but it's been a rocky year for them because the rigors of academia and the passage of time has caused Partner to drift from them a bit. They no longer have many interests in common, they don't talk all that often, and he attends most of their get-togethers out of obligation, because they heap lots of guilt on him when he doesn't. They're pretty much fed up with his absenteeism at this point and have been threatening to cut him off. He REALLY doesn't want this, but especially now that he lives somewhere else there's only so much he can do. He doesn't see why they can't just all roll with the changes each other's respective lives and adjust their expectations. Anyhow they've all been trying to work it out. But then they heard he was planning to have Thanksgiving dinner with other people instead of them and they got really hurt. We tried to arrange so that they could come to our dinner with us, but they aren't having it. They're basically holding it over his head, saying that if he doesn't come over for theirs, he might as well not even bother calling again. They've made it into a big symbolic thing. Their dinner, for what it's worth, is all being planned at the last minute (at least compared to the other one we'd RSVP'd for). I was hoping we could at least sort of stagger our plans and pull appearances at both, but the two dinners are scheduled for the exact same time. I refused to break the plans I made in advance, for all kinds of reasons (it would be rude; I don't want to spend all day marinating in the tension of the other dinner; I don't negotiate with terrorists). My partner decided he'd go to his friends' dinner and then come join me at the original one later in the evening. So he wrote his friends and said he'd hang out with them from 3PM till about 7PM and then leave to go meet me and the others, and they are apparently NOT having this at all either. It seems to be all or nothing for them. As for me, I'm really upset at the idea of not being together on Thanksgiving. I was upset even when I thought he would be coming to join me later, and I'm even more upset at the idea of just not seeing each other at all. It's been so long since we've gotten to do anything like a normal couple, and I've barely seen him at all since October, and I'm really frustrated that his friends didn't check in with me sooner to make plans if it was so important -- they know me, we hang out sometimes. I feel like we could have worked something out. But now they're basically forcing him to choose between them and me. At this point I don't think I would be able to go spend the day with them civilly even if I was willing to break my other plans. Which I really don't want to. I have thought about contacting them directly and seeing if we can come to some sort of agreement, but Partner has urged me to stay out of it and let him handle it. He's miserable and stressed about it. I'm miserable and stressed about it, but I don't want to make him feel worse than he already does. Nobody knows what to do. Should I just resign myself to being missing out on spending Thanksgiving with him? Or what??

• Answer:

  What a mess. I have no advice, except this: Stay out of it. He's already being forced to choose between them and something else, don't put him in the position where he has to choose between them and you even more. You will win, but nobody will be happy. Unless things are entirely different from the way you describe them from your partner's perspective, his relationship with these people is doomed. Be supportive, be there, but be as removed from it as possible. Tell him why -- that you can't deal with people who are hurting him so much and acting so childish. But don't bring out the drama even more. It might be short-term painful for you (not getting to spend as much time with him as you like) but it will be long-term better for your relationship if you give him the space to figure this out for himself.