My husband and I are both kinds of the black sheep of our families , honestly some of your narrative was almost word for word a description of parts of our lives . I was raised in a staunchly conservative , extremely prejudiced , uneducated , and somewhat fundamentally religious household . I now lean liberal , identify as nonreligious , am in my 3 rd year of med school , and have friends of every shape , color , and orientation . I ' ve been told I ' m going to hell , called a faggotlover , ridiculed about my book smarts , and accused of being a racetraitor . Other than that , my family seems to love me . It ' s weird . I think they all like to think that this is some sort of phase I ' m going through , and that one day I ' ll come around and realize what the real world is like . Every dinner and holiday used to be fights . My dad and oldest brother yelling about killing all the ragheads and me screaming at them about how stupid and ignorant their views were . Over the past decade or so , things have calmed a little bit . I no longer engage in fights , and I ' m not afraid to leave situations that aren ' t conducive to maintaining a low stress level . I think shifting societal values have made a difference too . They still use slurs at times and frown at homosexuality , but they don ' t parade their beliefs anymore . It seems they might be growing up . Honestly , a lot of my calm came from realizing that these were the people I ' m related to . I can ' t change them , but I can control how much of myself I expose to them and how I react to their behavior . I do love them , despite their faults , but I won ' t be made to feel guilty about seeing them twice a year . In the years of the guilt trips , I would calmly respond with an explanation of how uncomfortable and belittled I was made to feel , and how no matter how they felt about that , that was my experience , and I wasn ' t going to put myself through that more often than I needed to . The end . My husband ' s family is a little more like yours , it seems . He ' s basically been adopted completely into my family because his sucks I know , my family is the good one , lord help us . He hasn ' t spoken to or seen his mom in about 8 ish years , and that isn ' t going to change , NC permanently . His dad is incredibly selfish and flaky . He ' ll call my husband up when he ' s been drinking and lay the guilt on about how he never sees him , how my husband is barely even a son to him because he never spends time with him , blah blah . However , every time my husband makes plans with him , he either flat out says no or cancels the day of . One time we actually got him to have dinner with us , and he answered his phone midway through and talked to his gf for like 10 minutes right in front of us , told her he wasn ' t doing anything important and that he could easily run by the grocery store on the way home , then got off the phone and told us he had to leave and get home , since his gf needed something from the store right away . Despite this , he complains to all my husband ' s aunts , uncles , and cousins about how my husband never makes time for him and how abandoned he feels . I ' ve only been with my husband 6 . 5 years , but it already drives me crazy , I don ' t know how he handles it so well . My husband basically just stopped caring . He has a brother that he ' s close to , along with his wife and kids , and he focuses on them . When his dad starts acting up , he just washes his hands of it and tells himself that these are the choices his dad is making , and there ' s nothing we can do about them . His dad is welcome to ruin his own life , but we ' re not going to allow him to ruin ours . When we got together , we realized that the 2 of us were the only stable family we had . When wet got married , we both changed or names to a hybrid of both of them , since we saw it as us starting over with a new family . We are everything to one another , or families are just background characters . For the most part , my family , as horrible as they sound , aren ' t terrible people . Just incredibly flawed . They ' re very loving toward my husband , and my parents think of him as just another son , they ' re very close , so that helps . He doesn ' t receive any gifts for the holidays or his birthday from anyone but my family , and they attend all his important events . I think maybe if you tried to focus more on the family you and your gf have formed , and maybe more on her family a bit , it will make things easier . You can ' t change your family , but you can rise above it and realize that the only people they ' re really hurting with their decisions are themselves . One day they ' ll realize they could have had a wonderful relationship with their son , and they threw it away . Or maybe they won ' t . Either way , you get to decide how low they can drag you , and how personally you ' re going to take their character flaws . They ' re flawed people , don ' t let them trick you into thinking it ' s your fault or that you have any control over it . Focus on you , let them become background characters in your life . They don ' t deserve more .