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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/No-Lawfulness-9679 on 2023-08-03 13:09:13.
I am a Flight Attendant for an airline that for my own privacy i’m not going to name but my job is relevant to this story. My job comes with several perks most notably that I can fly standby for free and that I am given 10 buddy passes annually to allow my friends/family to fly standby too.
My two year anniversary with my partner is approaching (Edit: He is 31 and i’m 29, I just realised I didn’t add our ages) and as we are getting serious I decided a Holiday together was a good idea, I planned it all out and paid for the hotels and our excursions as my gift to him as I also had the flights covered. He has never had a Holiday abroad as he was raised by a single Mother and money was always tight so I thought this could be a fun thing for us to experience together.
His mother heard about this trip and began to demand I bring her too as I have “free” tickets to pass around and pointed out how i’m always “traipsing around the world” while she and her son have never flown anywhere and it’d be far more special for him to experience it with her as it’d be both their first time abroad there was also a backhanded comment about how I get several of these tickets yet in two years i’ve never offered them to her son or her. His Mother and I have never gotten on but he is close to her and loves her so i’ve done my best to ignore her even with all her jibes at me that imply i’m not good enough for her son but this was when I finally had enough.
I explained to her that Buddy Passes aren’t a free flight, that it’s just a much cheaper flight for the person using the pass and that it’s not an assured seat as you’re flying standby, I then pointed out this is a romantic trip for our anniversary and I found her wanting to come along quite frankly creepy and she needed to step back. She threw a fit at this for how disrespectful I was being to her and began to turn to my partner and complain and whine about this and how I was trying to turn her into the bad guy. He doesn’t like her being upset and quietly suggested that if I give her a ticket that he could pay the cost at which point I said that money wasn’t the issue at all and the issue was that she couldn’t see why a couple’s trip wasn’t exactly “mother friendly”. She latched onto him having no issues with this and told me I was being spoiled and how if her baby boy was ok with it I needed to be too.
At this point i’d had enough and told her if she came along the trip wasn’t happening, in private I told him that if he wanted us to have any future then he needed to work on his boundaries with her as i’m not having a MIL who will try and walk all over me and overrule decisions in the family. He feels i’m being unreasonable and that she’s just protective and wants to be involved in his life, I come from a vastly different family background than him so perhaps i’m being a little too harsh in this all I know is my own Mother would be horrified at the idea of trying to tag along on this trip never mind demanding tickets…AITA?