This week on So You Think You’re an Adult, one mother asked how to talk her daughter out of marrying a man that her family and friends hate.

“I know as parents you’re supposed to let your adult children live their own lives, and generally we do,” she told Moncrieff.

“I have never butted-in or interfered, but I’m very close to intervening now.

“Our eldest just got engaged to her on-again, off-again boyfriend – we are reeling from the news.

“They were together for four years and he made her miserable.

“Eventually, after a lot of back and forth, they broke up.

“I would have been very much vocal about how this was the right thing to do; all of her friends rallied around and felt the same as us – that he wasn’t going anywhere in life and treated her horribly.

“She was only single for about six months, and I think found it very difficult, so soon he weaseled his way back in.

“She’s expecting us to host a big engagement party, but I can’t bring myself to celebrate when I know she has picked the wrong person - what do I do?”

Closeup shot of an unrecognizable man putting an engagement ring onto his fiancees finger.

Broadcaster Barbara Scully said this woman already answered her own question in the first line of the letter.

“We are supposed to let our adult children live their own lives and not interfere, and that’s really the beginning and end of it,” she said.

“That holds true even if you think that they are making a mistake, and that’s whether it comes to picking a partner or picking a career or dropping out of university of whatever – there's only so much you can do.”

'He's going nowhere in life'

TV personality Declan Buckley said that “as a legal case against this guy, I’m not really swung”.

“I noticed in that letter that in the litany of accusations against this fella was a general, ‘he’s going nowhere in his life’,” he said.

“Then there’s the specific, the breakup – there wasn’t any kind of, he did this and then he did that.

“I’m just feeling that whoever wrote this letter took against the person who hurt their little daughter in that moment and that person will never be forgiven, no matter what – whereas the daughter has.”

Barbara said it is entirely possible that this engagement is a mistake, but if so, that is something the letter writer’s daughter will have to realise on her own terms.

Main image: Mother unhappy with engagement. Image: Dmytro Zinkevych / Alamy. 10 May 2018