Maybe you can help me clear this up. We are family of a widow that lost her husband last August, I am her daughter-in-law. I was one of the first to recommend that she should date and get on with her life. The problem is now that she is dating, she is trying to introduce her "new boyfriend" to her granddaughter (our niece) and generally force acceptance on her kids of the new man, whose name we don't even know yet.

That, and she is lying about the amount of time that she has been dating him. When confronted about it, she alternates between hanging up the phone and screaming and twists the problem into the fact that we don't like the fact that she is dating, which is not true at all.

My spouse has angered her by not accepting her behavior as rational or normal given the situation, especially since one of the reasons that she is giving for dating is to find a man to renovate her house. She is also flying to Vegas with this man in a month that we don't know the name of, a place she liked to visit with my ex father-in-law. She is not a gambler but I am worried that the new squeeze is.

Are we being ridiculous here to be concerned about her and this behaviour? We're not really sure what to do. My greatest fear is that this new guy is a con artist and we should get a background check done, but my spouse is too angry at her to go that far. He maintains that she is an adult and is responsible for her own choices, but I am concerned that her choices here may land her in the poorhouse.

Should we just do as she wishes and ignore everything without any opinions on the matter, or should we go ahead and get a criminal record check done by a PI, if only just to show her and the rest of the family?

If I am completely off the reservation here, please feel free to let me have it with both barrels. I came to a community of boomer women so that I would have the opinion of women from her generation. All the kids/spouses etc. are in their low to mid thirties.