You can’t change your parents, and changing their opinions, at least through arguing, is probably just as difficult. You can, however, examine their warnings, heed them when they’re right, and otherwise prevent their influence and incompetent expertise from interfering with your ability to make the best possible choice.
For instance, if your family is so loud and intrusive that it overwhelms prospective partners, it’s probably impossible to get them to tone down their style, and you should never oblige yourself to protect your family and spouse from mutual complaints of pain, dislike, and vulnerability. So ask yourself how important it is for you to stay closely family-involved, or at least for you to force your partner to be as involved as you are.
It’s possible, for instance, that you and your family are bound together by a business or other necessity. Or you may just love their company, don’t intend to leave town, and can’t imagine not getting together regularly. In that case, you need a partner who can at least tolerate your family and, preferably, appreciate what you like about them, even if he doesn’t want to spend as much time with them as you do.
So make it clear to prospective partners that they don’t have to love your family, but since you have no intention of divorcing or leaving them in the near future, putting up with some family contact is part of the deal. Your job isn’t to make them happy with one another, but to make it clear that they will have to get along, and that you don’t want to hear any complaints.
If your family requires you to choose a partner with their cultural, ethnic, or religious roots, don’t let rebelliousness control your decision; the last thing you want is to choose a partner in response to your parents’ reaction to what he represents rather than according to your own tastes and standards. Instead, do as you’ve done and assess your feelings about the importance of partnership with someone who shares your roots, both in terms of how much easier family relationships will be and whether a common background and set of values will make it easier for you to understand each other and raise your children in your old tradition (if that’s important to you, not just to your parents).
Then assess the likelihood of finding a partner who meets all your basic criteria for being a nice, strong person you like and get along well with, and your likelihood of finding someone with all those qualities who also shares your roots. If you value those roots and enjoy close family ties, choosing someone who meets both requirements will always make your life easier. What often happens, however, is that you can’t find the person you’re looking for within your own community, and after a long dating drought and several breakups, you find a solid person from another background. If that’s the case, trust your experience and know that, despite your parents’ possible protestations, you’ve made a meaningful compromise.
If you do find someone with a different background and do decide to compromise, accept the risks of parental nonacceptance and complicated child-rearing decisions. Let your parents know that you care about their values, thoughts, and recommendations, but that you believe your decision is right and hope they will adjust in time.
Having parents who get too close to your dates and then suffer when you break up with them is unfortunate and awkward, but not a problem you should take responsibility for. After all, your parents know that your priority isn’t to find them a new friend, but to find someone you can eventually work with to make a new family. Their long-term interest is that you forge a marriage that survives and prospers and provides security for their grandchildren, not that you expand their social network. Don’t try to change your parents or protect them, other than to suggest that they get a dog or become more involved with their local peer group. Instead, even if they feel sad or regretful, stay focused on finding someone who is a good match for you and who can be a good partner and parent. After all, these are the selection criteria that matter most and that will work best, in the long run, for everyone.
If a prospect doesn’t work out, worry less about how much your parents will miss her and more about what might have gone wrong. That way you can learn from the experience how to make a better choice next time and whether you should wait longer to bring prospects around your family. They might grumble about never getting to meet your girlfriends, but you’re just sparing them from getting overattached to candidates who may not work out for you.
Having a good family can teach you a great deal about how a good partnership works, but even parents who’ve done right by you can be wrong about who would make a worthy partner for you. That’s why it may be a mistake to try to mesh a prospective partner with the family you wish him or her to be a happy part of.
If you can keep family-related anger, disappointment, or guilt from controlling your partnership negotiations and decisions, you can make the best compromise possible between finding a good partner and finding a way to stay close to your family while everyone keeps their opinions to themselves.
Named for Nearest and Dearest: What Certain Names Can Teach You about That Person’s Family History
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Name
Examples/Variations
Inherited Pros as a Partner
Inherited Cons as a Partner
Old Waspy name
Cape, Rutherford, Tristan, or any name that could also work for a butler or that you could picture on a college library or dorm.
Possibly a lot of money, property, and entrée into secret societies that control world economies and racing yachts.
Possibly no money (anymore), strange diseases from inbreeding, strange prejudices from generations of snobbery, so many pairs of madras golf pants.
So-and-so Junior (or III, IV, etc.)
Aside from the obvious, also “Tripp” (which is just a WASP term for “III,” so see above).
This depends on so-and-so senior.
If only a few decades separate Joe Shmoe Senior from Joe the III, then the Shmoes may have a long history of schmimpulse control.
Amber
Any name where i’s and y’s and k’s and c’s are interchangeable (e.g., Tami, Krystal, Jayde, etc.) and some letters are duplicated for no obvious reason, other than a possible typo (e.g., Ambyrr, Aubree, etc.). Really, anything in the stripper family.
Has been gifted by her mother (possibly also named Amber) with a name that lets you know immediately that there’s a 99 percent chance she has a mood disorder and will ruin your car or credit or life.
Can get pregnant from eye contact, will limit your diet to the lunch buffet at the strip club where she works, will teach you a lot about borderline personality disorder and bond court, and all it will cost is your sanity and well-being.
A Good Family and Marriage
Just as time, kids, and a single shared toilet can change your view of your spouse and marriage in general, they can also change your opinion of your in-laws; when the honeymoon period ends, it can end not just for you and your wife, but for all those who ride with her, as well. You will probably discover the truth about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, including your own. The challenge is to prevent disappointment or anger about the unfairness of painful compromises from drawing you into unwinnable conflicts. Instead, accept what experience has taught you and use your wisdom to judge the value of those compromises, both within your marriage and within the family you married into.
Here are three examples:
• I thought my husband would be a great father because his parents are solid, but it hasn’t turned out that way. He works too hard, and then when he’s home, he buries himself in reading and gaming and barely says two words to me or the kids. I wonder if I should get his parents to speak to him. My goal is to get him to be a better father and husband.
• I liked my husband’s mother at first sight, but after we got married and had kids, I found she tends to take over for me as a parent whenever she’s around. She loves my kids, which is great, but she tends to smother them and not follow my rules. If I get angry about it, my husband gets upset and says I’m ungrateful for h
er help. My goal is to not let my mother-in-law take over my job.
• My mother-in-law sounded fine from my wife’s description, but I barely met her before we married. After our kids arrived, she moved closer, and I found out she’s a sad pothead who likes to hang out at our house, eat our food, and tell her daughter all her troubles, conspiracy theories against her, and generally babble until she’s ready to pass out or smoke more weed. I don’t want to criticize her or cause conflict with my wife, but I don’t like her or see her as a positive influence on our young kids. My goal is to keep her from taking over our family.
For most people, one of the great gifts and curses of being around family is that you’re not required to be polite. For dysfunctional families, this results in free-flowing insults and anger (and occasional injuries), but for close families, this means you have a loving group you can joke with, relax around, and fart in front of with ease. And if being overly frank and open does lead to conflict, your closeness can make those conflicts easier to resolve; disagreements with mere acquaintances such as roommates tend to simmer with dirty looks and passive-aggressive notes by the dirty dishes before there’s even a confrontation, but close family can quickly call one another on their bullshit, knowing what the limits of each are and that, no matter how much yelling, they’re still family and will eventually get over it.
The problem with in-laws is that they exist in a social gray area: they’re family, so you do share a bond, but they’re not your family, so you can’t cut loose, cut the bullshit, or “cut one” around them the way you can with your blood-related clan. You don’t know their history the same way, which means you might misjudge the influence they’ll have on your spouse and not end up with the family you bargained for (but may now be eternally bound to through your kids).
Ultimately, your shared objectives, combined with the family bonds you don’t share, make you less like family and more like coworkers. That’s why your best approach to conflict resolution is to embrace the boss role, managing the relationships between your little family and the greater one with a detached professionalism that is more formal than spontaneous family fun.
If, for example, your husband’s family is great and you see he’s inherited their hard-worker gene, you’ll be caught off guard if, unlike the rest of his tribe, he’s unable to multitask with other priorities and, after a hard day’s work, has little to contribute at home to you or the kids.
Instead of driving him farther into his shell by voicing your disappointment, go into business-manager mode and frame those concerns positively. After expressing admiration for his hard work at the office, ask him what he expects from himself as a husband and father, based on what he admires about his own father and fathers in general, and whether he is meeting those expectations. The more businesslike the conversation, the less defensive he’s likely to become.
Don’t assume that anyone else can conduct this discussion better than you can; if you push him to talk to a shrink or his parents, he may minimize the extent of his withdrawal at home, and they may have a hard time figuring out whether he’s as absent as you say or whether you’re feeling needy and disappointed. It helps if you can present the facts confidently, minus the resentment.
Don’t feel obliged to lie about your being angry and disappointed, but don’t let it become a topic for discussion. Your point isn’t that you’re angry and want to feel better; it’s that you’re concerned about the impact of his interpersonal behavior on the family and wish that he would review it as objectively as possible so he can decide whether he believes it’s a problem. If he doesn’t see it as a problem, don’t expect him to change in order to make you happy.
With that agenda in mind, keep track of the nature and duration of his daily family-related activities and then offer to review his patterns with him and a shrink, his parents, or anyone else you both respect. What you want is not a discussion about feelings, but about whether his behavior is off the end of the bell curve and is likely to damage relationships he values. As long as you can control your feelings and observe and present facts, you may help your husband develop motivation for changing his behavior. Otherwise, at least you know you’ve done your best and can figure out how to move forward, with or without him.
Mothers-in-law are always a mixed bag, and in this second example the mix of the bag is not as bad as it could be. The upside is her willingness to provide child care when you’ve got other things to do that are necessary and important, but the downside is that she’s overstepping her in-law boundaries by rejecting your parenting rules. If you let your frustration show, your anger triggers your husband into defending his mother; after all, he benefits from her child care, you’re the source of anger, not she, and he’s not as sensitive as you are to her intrusiveness since she’s doing just fine by the boundaries he grew up with. The danger is that your frustration will trigger his defensiveness in a vicious cycle.
Instead of airing your feelings, put the ol’ boss hat on and develop a set of rules that will create a new set of boundaries and give you as much control as you need, assuming that you also believe your mother-in-law should continue to contribute. Define rules of behavior that are necessary and set hours when you don’t wish to be disturbed. Then present them to your husband and then your mother-in-law as a positive solution that will reduce friction. They’re not meant as an expression of blame or rejection, but as an improvement that clarifies basic rules and areas of responsibility.
Discovering that your unexpectedly weak, dependent pothead mother-in-law has attached herself to your new family is certainly a challenge, but it may have been unavoidable; even if your wife was well aware of her mother’s weaknesses, she may have felt too responsible for supporting and protecting her to say no or set a firm boundary. Now that your mother-in-law has come to hang out, your objections, if stated critically or with anger, are likely to make your wife more protective and cause conflict in your marriage, which will make you resent your mother-in-law all the more. So beware the dangerous, vicious cycle of expressing honest mother-in-law resentment, especially if your wife cannot easily fix the underlying problem.
Instead, give thought to your beliefs about good child care, good parenting, and the time you and your wife need to nurture a good marriage. Instead of venting fears about your mother-in-law’s bad influence, put forward Grandma visitation rules that will protect the kids from inappropriate behavior. Urge your wife to define the amount of one-to-one time her mom and the kids need with one another. Then ask her whether limiting her mother’s time with the family will do any real harm, other than cause painful feelings that Grandma should be managing by becoming sober and independent. Don’t express resentment about your wife’s unavailability because her stoned mother sucks up her time.
Like any good manager, express confidence in your vision of a better set of rules while urging your wife to sign on. Yes, you have negative feelings about her mother, but they don’t distract you from your more important goal, which is for her mother to have a positive experience as a grandmother, to contribute in appropriate ways, and to feel supported. But first she needs rules to prevent her from undermining what you and your wife believe is good for the kids and your own relationship.
When you encounter unexpected problems with your family, in-laws, or your partner’s character, don’t let disappointment, anger, and criticism control your choices. Even strong partners and families have weaknesses that you couldn’t possibly have perceived or anticipated when you were getting to know them. Evaluate problems, not by how much they irritate or upset you, but by how much they interfere with what you believe are the necessities for a good family life. Then devise good management solutions and present them positively.
Many in-law-related problems are disappointing, irritating, and unfair but can nevertheless be well managed, even if they can’t be worked through as quickly (and frankly, and loudly) as they could be within your immediate family. Making a new family is hard work, so employ techniques you’ve
acquired in the workplace to effectively manage your new relatives as you work toward the shared goal of just getting along.
Did You Know . . . Truth, or Bullshit?
We examine widely accepted beliefs about relationships to determine whether they’re true (or not so much). The phrase in question:
“We all end up marrying our parents.”
Whether you were close to your parents or currently have a restraining order against them, lots of people are convinced that your parents program you to look for partners who remind you of them. The idea is, if your mother was overbearing, you end up marrying a ballbreaker, or if your father was a drunken asshole, you find yourself looking for love at last call. If your mother was strong and thoughtful or your father was a kind pragmatist, then you’ve got a good mold to work from, but either way, the notion is that we have less free will than we think in picking our partners for life.
While people do search out the familiar, even if what they’re familiar with is painful and destructive, ways exist to break old patterns and reset your search. They require a lot more discipline, patience, and willingness to withstand periods of loneliness, but if you’re determined enough to stop dating cold fish like your mom or mopey jerks like your dad, then you can break the cycle and create a marriage that’s unlike the one you grew up around.
No matter how you feel about your parents, you don’t have to fall into the trap they set for the next generation; with some hard work and careful screening, you can break the family curse that determines what a spouse should be.
VERDICT: BULLSHIT
A good family is an attractive asset when you evaluate someone for a long-term relationship, but it’s not a guarantee that your partner will have all his or her family’s strengths or that those strengths won’t also present problems when you all have to work together. Don’t let your wish to please a family or your delight in their qualities or loving acceptance interfere with learning more about your partner’s individual character and ability to set and respect boundaries in a situation that usually reveals them. Then use that information to make a good decision about whether to partner up or how to make the most of the partnership you have and the family that comes with it.
F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Page 16