Our problem is our roommate, “Fred.” My fiancé and Fred have known each other since college and are very good friends. Fred moved in with my fiancé in 2011. He has a lot of furniture and loves living in the house and showing it off to friends. Before I moved in, the house was definitely a bachelor pad.

For the first three months that I lived here, things were fine. I was actually really excited to have Fred live in the house with the baby as he is also in his mid-40s, never married, has no kids, and seemed really excited to get to play “uncle.” He’s been a great sounding board for me to vent to about things I feel I can’t tell my fiancé, and overall he’s been a wonderful friend! But over the last month or two (or three) he’s been really unpleasant to be around. He gripes about how my fiancé and I leave dishes in the sink, that we are too spread out (a lot of it is baby stuff) and we don’t take care of the house. If he comes home early from work, he’ll complain to me about how little my fiancé does to help me out around the house and how I won’t be able to rely on my fiancé for any help when it comes to the baby. It makes me very uncomfortable to hear him speak so negatively about my fiancé. It also bothers me because no one is perfect and Fred doesn’t clean up after himself either.

The house is a small two-bedroom house located near the beach in a nice neighborhood. We all love this house. However, with three adults and a baby on the way, it’s become very cramped! We desperately need a nursery for the baby, and the roommate hasn’t moved out yet and it’s really starting to cause A LOT of friction among the three of us and has started to affect our friendship with the roommate. We hate coming home if he’s there and all of us are very short with each other.

We haven’t been sure what our housing situation is going to be. This house is owned by my fiancé’s mother. As of right now, we all pay a third of the mortgage. The roommate pays a third, my fiancé and I pay a third, and his mother pays a third. If the roommate moved out we would not be able to cover the costs of 2/3s rent so initially we were planning on moving out. If the roommate stays in this house and we move out, he would have to pay full rent. My future mother-in-law, though, decided she doesn’t want strangers to live in the house or to deal with renters. She had the house refinanced and it’s looking like we might end up staying in this house after all. Upon finding this out, the roommate has made no attempt to find a new place to live.

Wendy, this is so frustrating. We have no nursery for our baby and he’ll be here in three weeks! We’ve put all the baby stuff in the family room, but obviously that is no place for a baby to sleep. He’ll be in the co-sleeper for a few weeks, but after that we have no place for him. I also don’t want to feel like I need to tiptoe around a volatile roommate, especially once the baby arrives. I don’t want to feel like I have to go hide away in my room to feed the baby or hide him if he’s crying. It’s our house too. I’m also worried that the roommate will still bring over guests and my fiancé and I both don’t want that at all.

I have always been one of those who could not understand how women stay in obviously messed-up relationships, and even as I write this, I imagine what would I do if my friend came to me in a similar predicament, and I would say: “Get away!” But now that it’s me, how do I walk away from everything I have worked for? How do I take that life away from my kids?? My boyfriend has been saying all the right things — that he is sorry, that he wants to work on our relationship, that he will do anything to get my trust back. But how??? What could he possibly do? I trusted him more than I trust myself. He was my best friend. We could talk about anything. We are not a couple of teenagers playing house. We made a conscious decision to have a family. I mean, yes, the second baby made things more difficult, but we knew what we were in for! All we had to do was survive this first 12-18 months! This was not supposed to happen to couples like us.

How do I ever look at him and not think about what he has done? How do I start trusting him again? How do I keep myself from panicking every time he is 10 minutes late from work? If I forgive him, how do I know he will never do this again? He says one of the reasons he did this is to escape the routine. But for the foreseeable future, that routine is not going to change. And what if that damned condom didn’t break? Would he have even told me? How do I know that it was only this one time (not that it matters much)?

We have decided to go to couples therapy, but until then, how do I look at him? How do I talk to him? I can’t leave, but I can’t throw him out either. I can’t talk to anyone about this, because even if by some miracle I will be able to forgive him, I know none of my friends or relatives ever will.