Getting Along with In-Laws

In-laws can be challenging. But those challenges have some straightforward solutions.

Getting along with relatives requires a different skill set than getting along with friends. After all you carefully choose your friends while Hashem chooses your relatives. While members of our own extended family can sometimes be hard for us to deal with members of our spouse’s family can often be even harder.

Let me issue a disclaimer at the outset: many people have been fortunate enough to be surrounded with loving family members both “blood relatives” and in-laws. However having nothing but excellent relationships with family members of all kinds is rare — something akin to winning the lottery. Most often people find some of their relatives challenging. Commonly people find their spouse’s relatives particularly challenging especially their parents-in-law. Let’s see why and discuss what small things can be done to help the situation.     

Sources of Stress

To begin with parents-in-law are parents. That in itself poses a problem. As you may know adults don’t want parents. Young adults particularly have finally gotten away from parental control and are more than ready to spread their independent wings. While they may be delighted to accept gifts (money babysitting etc.) they are no longer delighted to be told what to do or how to do it. And this is from their own parents. They certainly don’t want this sort of information from someone else’s parents (i.e. their spouse’s parents!).