My SO has a big extended family, good people who are nice to me. Can’t say I’m very comfortable around them, though. They came to the U.S. as political refugees, and they fiercely recreate their homeland within their houses, which means no English is spoken and strict hierarchies and their cultural rules and customs are to be followed. I’ve tried and failed to learn the language, so that excludes me from all conversation and shared jokes. I can get my SO to translate now and then, but it’s not the same as being able to take part. I’ve inadvertently offended some of them because I didn’t know some rule or “wasn’t friendly enough” or was “overly friendly.” I just try to stay in the background, because I respect their desire to hold onto their language and culture. It’s not fun for me, but it’s not about me.
Your mother is wedded (heh) to an idea of what it means to be married into a family that your wife doesn’t share. She is so wedded to it, she would be personally insulted if she discovered that your wife does not hold the exact same belief. It’s sad that your mother must be so very inflexible and not give your wife any benefit of the doubt. What’s especially sad is that your mother’s vision of your wife is clearly MUCH more important to her than the actual person, your wife. You can’t be comfortable around people who really don’t care about you. And holding on to idyllic images instead of perceiving the real person with all their inconvenient wants and needs, is a form of not caring about your wife.
They won’t miss HER if she’s not there. They’ll miss what she represents.
Oy. Please tell me you have a better reason for wanting her to go than keeping your mother from throwing a hissy fit. Please. Because if this is the reason you want her to spend her Christmas tying herself into emotional knots, not only will this discussion likely not go well, the subsequent one about whether you married her or your Mommy probably won’t be all that great either.
Personally, I probably also wouldn’t bring up how your sister agrees that if she just sucks it up or another 20 years she’ll get used to it.
Yeah, pretty much. If there’s really all this love and adoration, your mom’ll want you guys to do what’s best for your wife. Even if it’s not what’s going to make her happiest. The same way your wife wants you to do what’s best for you by going to your family, even if it would make her a lot happier to spend Christmas together at home*. That’s what loving somebody means–wanting what’s best for them, even if it’s not what you’d prefer. And if your mother starts up the Drama Llama bullshit, tell her just exactly that.
*Which you really ought to do periodically, and not just for your wife’s sake. Having holiday traditions that are specifically about the two of you and your own family unit is important.
Well, at the outset there were two reasons: one was to please my family, and the other was because I couldn’t get my head around the idea of her wanting to be alone rather than spending Christmas with in-laws. This thread has been helping me understand why she might prefer solitude. As for the former, I’m aware that by marrying, I made a commitment to be my wife’s husband before being my mother’s son. But I don’t believe this means I owe my mom zero consideration.
The unstated in all of this is that, yes, I will miss my wife if we’re not together for Christmas.
I wasn’t even going to mention that conversation to her. Just like this thread, I’m simply searching for different perspectives that might help me understand it all.
I don’t think it’s my mom in particular (well, maybe a little); I think such inflexibility is fairly common with older folks.
I’d suggest it may be both. She would be missed, AND the “one big happy tight-knit family” illusion will be popped.
Would it really kill everyone to let your wife take off one at Christmas? As it is, I don’t have kids and really want to broach the idea of having every other Christmas to ourselves…but I know I get no respect because I don’t have kids. I can hear it now - why would I want to spend Christmas with just the two of us? But like other people have said, I just want to start our own traditions.
I know when his parents pass on (and may it not be soon, they’re wonderful people) I probably won’t go to too many more family functions. Family just doesn’t mean the same thing to different people.
But all that aside, let her stay home this one Christmas. Say she’s sick as a dog, whatever. See how it works for her.
How much time do you spend with your family for Christmas? I love my husband’s family very much but honestly I love them so much more from January to October than I do from November to December. It isn’t that holidays with them aren’t fabulous or anything, just that there is so much required of everyone over the holidays and that makes it difficult to enjoy them the way I normally do.
They insist on us staying over for at least 2-3 days, they insist that everyone must dress up for dinner and presents and all that jazz even though we aren’t leaving the house for so much as a moment, and otherwise have family traditions that are overall pretty overwhelming. Especially considering our natural tendencies are very different (I like to sleep in a little on days off but they are all up at 6:30, I like to lounge in my jammies for breakfast but they are all dressed and ready to meet the day, etc.) I sometimes feel like I am imposing upon their lives even though they’ve never given me any reason to believe that they are bothered in any way by my preferences. I personally would like to go up for the day, open presents, have dinner, and then be on the train back home all the while in jeans and a sweater but that isn’t possible without defying the last 30 years of their family traditions so I smile, pack up a suitcase, and put on a nice dress for the sake of family harmony. Perhaps your wife feels the same way and would love to spend 5-6 hours with your family but doesn’t want the entire holiday to be a group affair?
This is what I wish, too. I hate staying overnight, to be honest. I never feel comfortable. I’d much rather take the train down here, too, but that will never ever happen, I know. (Of course we live pretty far away).
But we can’t just stay one night - they expect us for several days, too. Not comfortable! Used to be we’d go down for Thanksgiving from Wednesday night to Sunday night. I’d be exhausted when I got back. And there was no option of returning, say, on Friday - we have the weekend off, so they’d be like, Why not?! So now we don’t really go down for T-giving - it wears down my SO, too. This is what happens when people cannot be flexible.
Not at all. But then, neither is she.
We typically go for about three days. Frankly I’d be very happy if we all shitcanned the gift exchange; it’s difficult for all of us to come up with presents to give to everyone else, and I think it stresses everyone out and people end up with a fair amount of crap that they don’t want or need. Apart from that though, the atmosphere at my sister’s house is very relaxed. She’ll put together a nice Christmas dinner, but as far as dressing up, nah - just jeans and maybe something slightly nicer than a t-shirt. Schedules are all over the place: wife and I come from the eastern time zone, brother comes from pacific, sister is in mountain. wife and I are usually in bed by 10PM and up shortly after 6AM, sister sleeps poorly and is usually up shortly before or after us, and so we hang out and read the newspaper and chat and drink coffee until other folks get up. Sometimes there are big group outings to a local pedestrian mall or some other attraction, sometimes folks just hang around the house and read or watch football, whatever. Some of us get dressed before leaving the bedroom, some of us stay in sweatpants and t-shirt until well after breakfast.
This might be a viable approach if we lived just a couple of hours away from wherever the gathering was to be held, and if we visited often throughout the year - but we’re a good 1300 miles away, which means visits are rare and pretty much require air travel, including a long pre-flight wait before each flight and a long trips to/from the airports. Being there for a few hours just isn’t very feasible.
It’s interesting to see that you are placing family harmony above your own needs, while others are advising me to put my wife’s needs ahead of family harmony. I’m not suggesting that either is objectively more important than the other; I just see that different people choose different ways to resolve the conflict between those values.
I didn’t get along at all around my late husband’s family. We all despised each other, for the most part, and get-togethers were awful.
My fiance’s mom is really lovely and I’m very comfortable around her. We all went to Vegas last Christmas and it was fun to spend some time just hanging out with her, but she’s also someone who is quite private and does her own thing. She isn’t trying to get us to jump through hoops or anything (unlike my previous in-laws) and likes her own space.
Both Asimovian and I are not the kind of people who like to visit and stay in someone’s house for days on end, so I think we’ll avoid most conflicts that revolve around that.
To me, spouses come first and their comfort is paramount. If Asimovian ever says, “I would rather stay at home than go to that event” whether it’s family or otherwise, he gets to stay at home. No drama. No guilt.
Well, to be fair I recognize that they also make sacrifices to include me in the holidays. I have very specific dietary preferences that they are happy to indulge, they make sure to be very quiet in the mornings to let me sleep in if I feel like it, and they make a point of having activities that I enjoy or things that I’ve suggested as part of the festivities as well. The fact that they all sit down to turkey for dinner and make sure to have ham or chicken for me instead because I don’t like turkey at all more than makes up for my needing to wear a dress and heels to dinner, you know?
Besides that my family is pretty awful and my husband just dives right in when we spend time with them. He deals with the drinking and the political bickering without so much as a flinch and embraces their insanity when we spend time with them. My husband and I are city people who like to spend time at the theater, opera, and museums but he went fishing and hunting with my dad like he’d been born in the wilderness because it was important to my family so therefore it was important to him. Given his willingness to deal with my family bullshit I would be the world’s biggest bitch if I didn’t make a solid effort with his family too!
You all are really making me appreciate both my family and his since they do recognize that it’s ok to visit one’s own family without one’s spouse in tow sometimes. And that both families are ok with us staying in other places when we visit. I really DO have good in-laws! 
I’m all for prioritizing family harmony–provided I’m not the only one expected to do so. If family harmony means everybody sucks it up a little, that’s awesome, count me in. But if family harmony means I suck it up a lot while everybody else sails along like the Queen Mary because otherwise they’ll pout and cry…fuck that shit. I don’t negotiate with emotional terrorists in my own birth family, much less anybody else’s.
We’re not married but we’ve been together long enough that we may as well be.
I have been completely at ease with his family since day one. They treat me like just another kid and I treat them like another set of parents. I love them dearly. This extends into his aunts, uncles, and cousins.
He is perfectly at ease with my sisters but is not as comfortable with my mom and stepdad. He likes them perfectly fine but my mom is an unusual sort and has a lot of problems that he’s not used to. I am not close to the majority of my family and he hasn’t even met most of them. On my dad’s side he’s only met my father (whom he dislikes just as much as I do) and my grandmother (whom he thinks is the coolest grandmother ever) but no cousins or aunts and uncles. On my mom’s side he’s met about half of them at a wedding and that was it. He thinks my stepbrother is creepy (as do I) and he has never met my stepsister.
Machine Elf, how long have you been married and by chance is your wife an only child?
I think your family sounds great and the visits you describe sound much like those with both mine family and my in-laws. So far you’ve given no indication of mistreatment of your wife by your family so I would focus on trying to get her to articulate the source of her discomfort. Maybe it’s something you can work out.
Whatever the cause, you shouldn’t feel bad about skipping the holiday as long as you’re OK with it, but I think your wife should have approached you about doing it together and then maybe trying to see your family some other time.
If she just doesn’t care to see your family or care to be there to see you enjoy time with your family I’d see that as a big problem, especially if there’s no good reason for her discomfort.
Pretty good. My wife is an only child, but her aunt lived with her family forever. When we got married we lived far away from everyone, so we didn’t suffer from snoopy family syndrome. Two years later we moved 50 miles from them, but far from my parents. I’m surely providing them with a grandchild rapidly helped, but basically they were great. Only my father-in-law is still alive, but his is 95 and very with it.
I can see wanting to spend time with your family, but at night maybe it’s time to come home to your own family holiday. And that might be a big deal to her–when you married your wife, you created a family of your own. Maybe she feels like she married your entire extended family (but isn’t really a part of it). You insist on dragging her back there every year, but maybe she would rather build a new family tradition between your family of two. One that doesn’t involve your in-laws every single year. And just because you don’t have kids yet, that doesn’t mean you aren’t every bit as much a family.
Anecdote: I’m not married and I may never be–who knows? But in all my life, I have only ever liked attending holiday parties in the daytime. I have never wanted to do an overnight stay. That’s how we did it when I was a kid. We would visit my maternal grandparents on Christmas Eve, go home/sleep/open presents in the morning, and then to the paternal grandparents’ for lunch/dinner on Christmas Day. And to this day, I absolutely hate staying overnight at other peoples’ houses for any reason (my mom’s included). The bed isn’t my bed, the night sounds aren’t the sounds I’m used to, my pillows and blankets aren’t there, I can’t loop tv shows on my computer to help me fall asleep because my computer isn’t there, I can’t have sex. It absolutely sucks. Maybe your wife feels like this?
Anyway, you should ask her how she really feels and don’t judge her or get angry if she tells the truth. Hell, maybe she just doesn’t care for Christmas. Is she another religion, or an atheist? I’m an atheist and I’m pretty sick of getting xmas crammed down my throat for three months out of the year.
My husband thought there was no good reason for me not to want to spend time around his family hen not only did he not like them, but they were awful to both of us. “Why can’t you just ignore her? I do.”
So, who gets to say what’s “good reason”?
Unfortunately I will be offline for about a week starting tomorrow; I will come back to this thread for more discussion when I return.
Short answer to your question: we’ve been married six years. She’s the older of two children, though they’re only about a year and a half apart. We are both around 40.
I’ve been with my husband for nearly nine years, and married for just under two. We both introduced each other to our parents within the first year, and it took a while for both of us to get used to the different family dynamics. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m fairly comfortable with the rhythms of my husband’s family, but it took years of misunderstandings and discussions and efforts to meet halfway to get to that point. My husband’s dad was a lot easier to get used to, as he reminded me a little bit of my mother; the bigger issue was the fact that my family’s dynamics (especially communication dynamics*) and my husband’s family’s dynamics were pretty different, and it wasn’t something that either me or my mother-in-law were used to. I was cold and aloof, she was clingy and nosy, and it took quite a while to understand each other enough to get past these assumptions.
*Stuff like my family will bicker and argue and make fun of each other in a way that seems antagonistic to my mother-in-law, but is pretty harmless; one aspect of this was that she would talk to seek agreement, whereas I grew up in a “friendly debate/disagreement” discussion style. It took a while to get used to both styles, and led to some hurt feelings in the first three or four years. I also had to learn how my husband’s family did the same thing, and that the only way to get heard at the dinner table was to talk over people.
The holidays were the hardest part of getting used to stuff, and partially because of my mom’s death meaning that I no longer had the option of having Thanksgiving and Christmas as I had it as a kid (the married sibling follows mostly his wife’s family traditions, and the other sibling is not available during holidays due to the nature of his work). What this meant was having to occasionally have the holiday at our house with something a little closer to the traditions I had growing up so I wouldn’t get so homesick for childhood holiday celebrations.
The issue with your wife may be similar to my original reluctance to participate all the time with the in-laws, and not having access to one’s own traditions is something that can be emotionally draining.