This may have something to do with the fact that my interpersonal relationships work this way: I pour myself into a tiny number of carefully selected friendships, and my future husband would be (as my current BF is) the foremost of these. If he ceased to be the most important person in my life (barring children, I suppose), I would start to wonder about the state of the marriage. Not condemn the whole thing right off the bat, but wonder. This is not the sort of relationship I have with my parents–I love them deeply and owe them more than I could ever repay, but the loyalty I feel to them would never cause me to put undue strain on my marriage. Sounds a bit cold, I guess, but that’s the way of things.
Of course, this decision may be made easier by the fact that unless they face major financial disaster, my parents will always be able to do things themselves or pay someone else to do them. They have said they would rather my siblings and I focused on our own lives. I’ll always spend time with them and support them emotionally in any way I can, but my husband will come first.
For me, it would be spouse, if I still had one. I’ve never understood people (women especially) who have to call their mom every day, even when said mom is healthy and active and usually married. Once a week was fine for me. My daughter is now an adult, and living with her fiance, and even though she and I are MUCH closer than my mom and I ever were, I do not feel offended if she doesn’t call me daily. In fact, sometimes I get annoyed if she calls too frequently.
My mother has always made it very clear to my sisters and me that she expects us to put our spouses first in our lives. This in turn actually leads to what Bear Nenno seemed to be expressing about neither parent nor spouse taking priority as my mother has given priority to my husband. I rarely, if ever, have to choose.
My father died when I was 13 and even at that age I realized that my parent’s marriage had been something very special. For much of their married life one of their parents, most prominently my father’s mother, required a lot of their time and energy with little in return. Mother would often speak of not having had enough time with my father whenever we would talk about him and now sees that as one thing she can give her daughters. I hope to give this wonderful gift to my daughter.
Spouse. Of course, since I’d be living with her and my mom, dad, and family all live on the other side of the continent, that’s not much of a problem for me.
Since I’m divorced I’ll say my Son comes fist. Which is incediently beneficiary to my ex which is why I bought her a house to live in after we divorced so my son would have a yard to play in.
And no, buying the house bit wasn’t in the divorce agreement. I just did it…God! I hope she gets married soon so I can sell that stupid house.
My husband. A decade ago my mom was extremely ill (Lyme’s disease went undiagnosed for years), while my husband was battling severe clinical depression. Most of my attention was on trying to keep my husband alive. My brother and father were the ones to take care of mom.
Do you mean family, or do you mean household? Because from my point of view, they’re both spending more time taking care of the family’s needs. If a man doesn’t consider his wife’s mother part of his family, there’s a problem. A big one. And if they can’t, or aren’t willing to, work something out, there’s an even bigger problem.
If it were me in that situation, I think a lot would depend on the details of how helping Mom was affecting our marriage. If it just means he’s got a little extra work to do, tough tittie. He’d agree that taking care of my mom is more important than him having extra leisure time. Even if it weren’t important to him, he’d recognize that it was important to me, and making sacrifices for things that are important to each other is part and parcel of being married. If it meant we were never spending any couple time together, Mom could take the bloody bus, and we’d have dinner with her once or twice a week. If it were something between those extremes, my response would be likewise more moderate.
Overall, though, the hierarchy goes his needs > their needs > his wants > their wants.
No spouse, and never had anything remotely approaching a spouse, so I can’t really answer.
This does remind me of something my Chinese Lit. professor once said, though. He told us that there’s an old Chinese saying that goes something like “If your mother, your wife, and your daughter are in a sinking boat and you can only save one, who do you save? Your mother. You can have another wife, you can have another daughter, but you can never have another mother.” (With some people’s mothers this is probably just as well!) He speculated that most Westerners would probably save the daughter or maybe the wife.
Spouse. On a small scale, this comes up for us quite a bit. We live pretty close to my parents, and my mom likes to schedule outings on weekends that involve “just the girls”, meaning me, my sister, and Mom. I’ve canceled on her many a time in order to make use of my husband’s day off, or go do something as a family with him and our two kids, or whatever. When both of them want me to spend time with them, and I can’t do both, he always wins. (Not that I usually think of it as a contest.)
Well, I would think even some Easterners would think opposite, having quite an eastern mindset myself. You are responsible for your child, you save the child first. Not only that, but the elderly lady has lived her full life, and should be glad and honored to leap over the edge, as well as the wife who should be willing to give up everything for her child.
Not married so I can’t answer for me, but I have a couple of anecdotes that I’d like to share anyway.
My parents would probably both say spouse before parent. In the last ten years, my mother has periodically needed to visit her mother for a few weeks and help her with a “crisis”. (Moving out of her house into a one bedroom apartment, for example). She has done so willingly, knowing that as the only child of her mother not dependent on salary to pay the mortgage, etc. it was easiest for her to get away. Mom is the oldest of three, neither of the others have ever married. One of the things that has bugged her and added to her stress in this situation is the failure of her siblings to appreciate how hard it is to be separated from my dad for a long period of time. Yes, my dad can do laundry,fix lunch, cook dinner, buy groceries,etc. if Mom is not there to do it for him. But after 30+ years of Mom doing most of these things for Dad, they both like it better when Mom is around to do them. Besides, they like sharing a bed a night and being able to lean on each other emotionally.
Other anecdote. My mom has a couple of friends who have said that they hate their daughters-in-law. Given that Mom first heard this complaint when the sons were fifteen and not dating, this amused her. Why does this friend hate her daughter-in-law? She’s not good enough for him. (Neither son is any prize in my estimation. A comment I would not repeat for the benefit of the mother). Still, this attitude seems likely to create a situation where when there is a real daughter-in-law, she will feel disliked by her mother-in-law. This may in turn lead to daughter-in-law disliking her mother-in-law and thus not wanting to spend time with her. Which if they end up living as far apart as my parents are from their parents (or children) means that the mother-in-law may find herself not getting to see much of her son or potential grandchildren.
In other words, because the mother in question has made up her mind before she even meets her daughter-in-law, the likelihood that the son might make the choice of spouse before parents for unhealthy and preventable reasons increases. I would say that both of my parents would make their choice of spouse before parent for healthy reasons.