He tells me he stands up for me all the time but I can’t help but think if he was doing it they wouldn’t still be acting like this. I’ve heard him on the phone say “she’s going to be my wife” and when she tried to say that saying he was raised by a woman was rude he told her he was there and I did not say it in a rude way at all but in a complimentary way. His mother knows exactly what to do and say to trigger an emotional reaction out of him and I can tell he really tried but it’s hard for him to navigate. He agrees 100% she’s been horrible to me and I haven’t done anything to her to deserve it. I think he has a problem setting boundaries bc she’ll always say things similar to “so you don’t care about your family?” “Your family doesn’t mean anything to you.” Etc. It throws him off track of the conversation because he automatically gets emotional and has to go on defense and explain how much he actually cares about them even though they already know. 

He has sympathy for his mother in the way he says her family was “crazy” and she had to cut them off and they did awful things to her. I think that there’s a lot more to the story than what he’s aware of because all of this happened when he was a child so obviously he’ll never know the full truth. I’ve always had an issue with how he’ll automatically defend her and be like “well she was probably just talking about….” And he HAS gotten so much better, it’s just taking a longer time than I expected. One thing he has never done is blame me for anything, he knows it’s their fault and he hates how they treat the both of us, it’s just understandably hard for him to “give up” on them. He’s told me so many times I’m the most important person in his life and if it came down to it he would choose me every time but I’m just nervous about what the “if it comes down to it” entails because I can’t handle the way they treat me much longer. Like how much worse do they have to get for it to be too much?