Adult Child Says They Still Want Nothing To Do With Their Father — Even After Years of Pressure To “Move On”

In a Reddit post, an adult child said they still refuse to have their father in their life, even though years have passed and other relatives keep acting like time alone should have fixed everything. According to the post, the break with their father did not come from one petty disagreement or one awkward family holiday. It came from a long history of him choosing his new family over them and leaving damage behind that never really got acknowledged. By the time he wanted contact again, the writer said, the relationship was already beyond repair in their mind.

They wrote that what made the situation so exhausting was not just the father’s behavior itself, but the way other people kept trying to rewrite it into something softer and easier to forgive. In the post, the pressure did not sound like one heartfelt plea. It sounded constant — relatives urging reconciliation, telling them life is short, insisting that holding onto anger only hurts themselves, and acting like refusing contact was somehow the bigger wrong. The writer said that kind of pressure made the whole thing worse because it treated their father’s choices like background noise while treating their boundary like the real disruption.

According to the thread, the father seems to have wanted a way back in without fully facing what he had done. That was part of why the writer stayed firm. From their perspective, there is a difference between missing someone and actually taking responsibility for the harm you caused. The post reads like someone who has spent a lot of time being told they should want a father in their life and has finally reached the point of saying that wanting a father and wanting this father are not the same thing.

They also made clear that the decision was not impulsive. It was the result of sitting with years of disappointment and finally understanding that access is not owed just because someone is family. In the post, they did not sound triumphant about the estrangement. They sounded tired of having to defend it. That is what gives the story its weight. This was not somebody gleefully cutting off a parent over one ugly moment. This was somebody who had already lived through enough to know that reopening the door would only invite the same pain back in.

As the story unfolded in the repost, what stood out most was how often people around estranged adult children seem to act as though reconciliation is the only emotionally respectable ending. The writer pushed hard against that. They did not want revenge. They wanted peace. And for them, peace looked like distance. It looked like not having to keep reliving old wounds every time someone decided their father deserved another chance more than they deserved to be left alone.

By the end of the thread, the core of the story was simple: their father had made his choices, and the adult child had made theirs. The conflict kept dragging on not because the boundary was unclear, but because other people refused to respect it.