This is a photo on my (f28)Instagram. My brother in law (m42) reacted to it in DM, and said the above. I feel I replied normally, but now my sister (f39) apparently saw the message and is saying that I engaged in hot discussions with her man! I am myself married and I feel so bad now. I told my husband who said I did nothing wrong. Any idea how I could approach my sister ?
I feel like the answer to every post on these sorts of communities is “you need to have a responsible conversation about boundaries with all parties involved”
Did people not learn this as kids?
Very few people learn this, even as adults. Hence these threads
Egh, what a fkn creep. Tell your sister and her husband he should start being a normal person instead of a weirdo, unless he’s looking to get in trouble some day.
Your BIL is a creep and your sister is trippin because she’s in denial about it
He’s being a little perv to his wife’s younger sister but it’s easier for her to be mad with you than admit the person she chose to marry is a perv.
It is evident that he engaged. Tell her to sort this out with her man.
Thank you! He met my sister when I was 12yo so I see him as an older brother for me. This is what makes me sad as I feel, in hindsight, that he clearly wanted me to start talking about my body somehow
It’s clear that these feelings of brotherhood are not mutual. I don’t have a sister but I don’t think if I had one I’d be thirsting over her sassy little dresses like that lmao
Yeah, it’s a total breach of trust towards both you and your sister, and you have every reason to be upset by it and to take your distance from him.
It’s fucked in many ways - that you’ve known each other since you were twelve, that he chooses to creep on his partners sister for some reason, that he chooses to send creepy texts to women behind her back, and that he is creeping people out by sending weird texts at all. There’s a lot to be upset about and little to tolerate here.
Your response is normal. We try to avoid conflict.
Your sister’s reaction is not so strange - he betrayed her and revealed himself as a total creep, but it’s a lot to process so it’s easier for her to pin it on you than to reevaluate her entire life. It’s a normal reaction and part of the psychology making abusive and unhealthy relationships possible.
My recommendation would be to not allow men to be passive bystanders to their creepy behaviour. He is the problem here, and your sister is going through something where it’s hard to think straight. Try to be patient with her. If this becomes primarily a conflict between you and your sister he has succeeded in replicating some extremely formalistic bullshit.
Yeah, he contacted and he is salivating, but she is somehow in the wrong.
Look, I try to see the good in everything, but there’s no other way to look at it, that first message just comes off as creepy as fuck. Idk how close you are with your sister but it sounds like her man should be the person in trouble here.
Edit: thinking about this some more, if both of you were not in a relationship it would still be on the creepy side imo but I guess that could be construed as a pickup line. But in this situation ? Ew.
Call the pervert out HARD to everyone.
Claim your victimhood and make all other relatives aware.
If he’s doing it to you, he has no boundaries: he has/will do to others.“Victimhood”
It’s some negging and relationship-inappropriate comments that weren’t met with a hard shutdown, calm down.
Is he a creep, yes, because he’s clearly making the opening overtures and being skeevy about it in general.
Otherwise it’s not like he’s abusing power or sending dick pics and using that language hurts the people who actually need it.
I don’t see what’s your sisters problem. If that conversation made you uncomfortable she should be mad at her husband instead and nothing else.
You did nothing wrong. Your sister is just mad at her husband and incorrectly directing her anger at you too. He probably shouldn’t be flirting with you unless everyone involved (including spouses) is fine with that. Your response was not flirtatious or inappropriate in my opinion.
To be as charitable as humanly possible to her, I’d imagine the bit she has a problem with is where you mentioned you’re “not hiding much”, engaging in that conversation rather than shutting it down immediately?
Just to be clear, I’m absolutely not saying you’re in the wrong, or she’s in the right; you clearly didn’t engage in that type of conversation, and I imagine she’s eager to place the blame on you rather than face the fact that her husband is very obviously leching on her sister.
But I would hazard a guess at that being the bit she’s hung up on. Also his messages made my skin crawl, they’re weird as fuck.
You are totally right and I’m mad at myself for having written that. I replied too quickly. She thinks I wanted to engage on a chat about the size of my titties 😓
Stunning. No bra I guess? A bit risky but very elegant.
How the fuck is one supposed to respond to this bullshit? We try to avoid uncomfortable situations even after other people have already created them, so we tend to entertain people a bit too long.
Of course in retrospect it would have been better to not engage with him at all, but it’s hard to completely understand what’s going on at the spot, and as humans we feel a need to respond.
Don’t be mad at yourself. You’re not the creep here.
For the record for anybody else reading this in the future- if my BIL (who my sister married when I was 11) had said that to me, I would’ve replied, “Ew, what the fuck are you doing?” And immediately called my sister.
I get that we are giving grace to the person who received the thirst message, that’s fine, but you don’t have to “play nice” to anyone making comments about your body. If you need to, stop and think about what you’d want your sister to say if your husband was being a creepy asshole. (My sister would just want me to call her immediately. The ‘ew’ message is gratis.)
Yeah, that would be the better thing to do, but women tend to have been trained to try to salvage men’s fragile emotions in situations like this.Especially when similar things happen in real life it’s all about trying to escape without making the man upset/escalating the situation, and a text message from someone you know can feel similar.
I don’t think it’s a good thing to try to maintain civility, but I think it’s the natural and understandable reaction from anyone who is not prepared for this kind of situation.
I think it’s a common pattern that men do unacceptable things and that women are left questioning their own behaviour afterwards. On a societal level I think it contributes to a shortage of accountability for men.
Guy was being an absolute creeper and you should have said “what the fuck?” But instead you did as you have been programmed and tried to maintain civility and not embaress the man who decided to harass you unprompted and continue when you gave the indication that you were uncomfortable.
You did nothing wrong here and now it’s your fault because you are the woman in the exchange. Your sister would do welll to be an ally but if she doesn’t want to you ought to ask her how many DM’s her husband has sent out like that to other woman that she hasn’t seen. Then tell her to fuck off, tell him to fuck off and block him on whatever platforms you share.
Fuck that’s so infuriating.
You even called it out as an uncomfortable question. You’re as far from wrong here as one can be. I hope your sister comes around and can have an equally uncomfortable conversation with her husband.
Oh no absolutely not, don’t be mad at yourself - you replied in a very normal way, and haven’t done anything wrong – his intentions are colouring the chat.
I’m trying to understand what were his intentions though. Like, what was his best possible outcome? That I would say “hey here is what they look like”?! It’s really weird. I don’t get. And he is a smart guy normally
I don’t think he was thinking particularly far ahead, and it’s really not overly deep; he’s being a perv. You haven’t done anything wrong.
He is some flavor of perv or addict. He probably does or thinks about doing these type of things all the time, but he chose you because you’re family which gave him some sort of an “in” and more likely to respond to him than if he just DM’ed any other woman he’s creeping on.
His intention imo was just masturbatory fodder and it probably wasn’t much more than that. He may be smart normally but if he’s perving or an addict then his judgement is being clouded. And him trying to talk to you like this is an escalation because he was trying to establish some type of connection rather than do his creeping in silence.
What your sister should realize that if he’s done this to you then he absolutely has been creeping on other women. Your sister should be concerned about that because if he isn’t sending creepy messages to other women already then he will be.
What do you mean he’s an addict?
I mean that he has shown bad judgement and couldn’t help himself from messaging his SIL in an escalation that is clearly against the bounds of his relationship with the sister. So in the case of an addict he would be addicted to the feeling of doing this type of behavior. People can get addicted to all sorts of things, behaviors or activities. In this case i think he “couldn’t help himself” from making a bad decision, which does show to me on some level he could be addicted to some part of this.
It’s not like he had some sort of master plan with this. He just found it exciting to be creeping off to instagram pictures of his wife’s sister, and figured he could take it to the next level by contacting you about it. The fact that it’s a fundamentally bad idea is part of what makes it exciting to him.
But it’s a basic photo… I mean it’s not like my titties were out ! Or that I was in a bikini !
It’s a normal photo of you looking normal in a normal dress. It’s not that he couldn’t find juicier things on the internet, he just finds random pictures of you to be exciting because he knows it’s wrong. Combine that with an apparent lack of impulse control and you got yourself a nice little red flag.
There’s no point in looking for something you did “wrong” here. It’s not about the photo, and it’s not about your response. It’s about him, and nothing else.
There’s no picture you could have posted on Instagram which would have made this somehow your fault. Women post bikini pictures in social media all the time without it being an open invitation for harassment.
Dude your sisters husband is a fucking creep. You did nothing wrong.
If my brother in law said something like that to my wife he’d have an issue with me though.
I can’t help with approaching your sister, but you very obviously did nothing wrong. It’s not even approaching inappropriate from your end. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty common for someone in your sisters situation to try and put the blame on you instead of her husband. I don’t know why.
Lol! I’d be sleeping in the spare room indefinitely, if I sent messages like that to another woman…sister or not. I have no idea why she’s mad at you for something he said to you.
That man has some nerve. That’s really weird to say to anyone.
I feel like your sister’s reaction is the same as some people’s when finding their spouse cheating with someone else. Who do they get mad at and attack? Not their partner, but the person they are cheating with. It’s illogical and dumb. But they don’t want to be mad at their partner. They want very desperately to believe that it was someone else who forced them to do something horrible.
Not that he was cheating, but this is the next closest thing and your sister feels an emotion similar to that.
Not to excuse her, but I think that’s where she’s coming from. It’s a dumb response and hopefully she realizes it and chastises her husband, not the innocent sister who’s just minding her own business and shared an innocent picture. What did she expect you to do? Just not respond? Would she have been mad at him for starting this conversation?
I’m sorry you had to read this and have her go after you. This is so dumb and I feel for you.
Your husband is right, you didn’t do anything at all out of line, not if what’s in the screen shot is all there was.
The only one who said anything that might be “hot” was him, and even that was more creepy or inappropriate than hot.
Looks like she’s feeling hurt by him, and taking it out on you rather than face the possibility her husband was just thirst hunting her sister.
Only way I can think to approach her, assuming you don’t want to let her cool off for a while is to first block her husband, contact her via text and say that you had zero intent of anything whatsoever with him, that you’ve blocked him so no more miscommunications can occur, and leave it at that. You don’t have anything to apologize for in that screen shot, though I guess you could say you’re sorry if what you said got misconstrued.
Thanks for the detailed opinion. Just clarifying that my sister is mad for the part where I say I’m not hiding much, for her it was a willingness to engage in a talk about my breast size 🙄
I would have interpreted it as “well duh, where would I be hiding a bra in that picture”, but I guess it’s open for interpretation. In either case the problem here is his message, not your response. It’s pretty clear you’re not exactly eager to engage.
Jfc, was your sister dropped on her head as a baby? You may have answered, but it was his question, and you even objected to it.
Being real, in a similar situation, as much as I love my sister, I’d tell her to shove something unpleasant into an excretory canal. You’re a much calmer person than me to be willing to be the one to try and repair things here.
Hell, if one of her partners said something similar to my wife, I’d probably pick the object to serve as a rectal probe and do the work personally on that partner. But I know I’m a wee bit over prone to such things.
The funniest part of this to me is that the husband says she did nothing wrong.
My fiance would take a moment to reassure me, and then he’d be going hunting. I’d be calling my sister to warn her that he’s on the way and I’m not going to stop him.
I can’t know what it’s like to be a woman, but I can only dream that my reply would not have been so polite.
Like if you said nothing in reply and just sent a screenshot to his wife saying “you need to talk to him about this” would that have been too impolitic?
I feel guys like this are just divorced dudes in waiting anyway. Immature, out of control, selfish, unaware. I would find any degree of harshness conscionable.
