 (Nick Galifianakis for The Post) | Carolyn Hax is away. The following first appeared June 17, 2007. Dear Carolyn: What do you do when your father and stepmother adamantly refuse any acknowledgment of, or contact with, your significant other, because in their paraphrased words, they think she is wrong for you and therefore refuse to show approval of the relationship? My girlfriend is wonderful; she is a partner in every way, and I respect, admire and am in love with her. Even if my father and stepmother's objections were what I'd call reasonable — my girlfriend was unkind to them or to me, prone to fits of psychotic rage, into Kenny G — I'd find their boycott to be a far less than mature and reasoned way to handle the situation. Their objections, however, are that my girlfriend is "heavy" and this somehow means problems in later life, that she is overbearing, and that when my stepmother sent her a Christmas decoration last year, my girlfriend thanked her in a subsequent card rather than sending a specific thank-you note. I am not making this up. My gut is that the core issue is my stepmother's tendency to try to control situations and relationships — which I've seen over the years in other contexts, including her own family, from which she has been essentially estranged for the past three years. To my 38-year-old self, this is insane and unacceptable. How do you proceed in a case like this, lovingly yet firmly, when your father asserts nothing but unconditional acceptance of his wife's absurd demands? — Within the Beltway | 
