Yes, you have it hard. There is no pleasing someone who won't be pleased. And it does seem odd that you must try so hard to please him, and at the same time, he has no interest in pleasing you at any level. Really, he is an a&&. But name calling is bad, even if I don't actually know the man.
My opinion is just that, my opinion. But I have lived longer than you, and over the course of my troubles I came to the conclusion that it was not in my best interest to keep the secrets of those who wronged me. I did find that when I went public with the truth about the way I was psychologically (not physically) abused by my son, and later my husband, those behaviors stopped. Maybe it was sheer coincidence. I was amusing at social events because when someone asked me a simple question like "How's the family?" I launched into the story of how my son was stealing from us and dropped out of high school, or that my husband had a mistress. I startled a lot of people. But both my husband and son knew that I was talking about them in public. And they didn't like it. I still don't know if that led to their changes in behavior. But the behaviors ended fairly soon after that.
Anyway, just my opinion, But I don't see why you have to "act as if" in front of his family. Surely your family got the gist of things when you arrived alone for Thanksgiving. No one really believed he "had to work" or whatever other excuse you might have given.
