That’s super fucking decadent.
I like it.
mrAru got along fantastically with my Dad, and gets along with my Mom and brother swimingly. He is as home cooking in Mom’s kitchen, and rummaging in the basement or garage for missing cookware as he would be in his mother’s house. I come from a family that is in general not into divorce as a solution [my parents got married in 1949 and were together until my dad died a couple years ago] and mrAru came from parents who got divorced when he was moderately young, and both parents got married again.
I get along great with his Mom, sister, and half brother. Never met his Mom’s second husband, he died in a crash a couple years before I met mrAru. The dynamics with his Dad are baffling. I get along just fine with his Dad as long as the step monster-in-law is nowhere around. I chat on the phone with him when he calls to talk to mrAru. 3 years after we had gotten married mrAru was out to sea when I saw in the news that there were fires in the hills near Yucaipa so I called to see if they were OK and she answered the phone and I had to explain in tiny little words exactly who I was … :dubious: despite having met her several times over the previous 5 years. I would have thought “Hi, it’s Marilyn, Andy’s wife. He is out to sea but I was calling to see if you both were OK” should have made it perfectly clear who I was. She had only been married to Andy’s Dad for about 30 years by this point in time…:rolleyes:
I feel pretty OK about rummaging for a snack, or getting Monica’s kids a snack [sheesh, they are all over 15 now :eek: ] and schlepping around in jammies. They are OK with me skipping church on Sundays [they are episcopalian, and I am a heretical agnostic] and we are going to be moving back to California so we can be near them after Mom passes.
I am very comfortable with the family of my spouse.
We never see each other, aka, the perfect relationship.
I’m back. Here’s an update:
We purchased plane tickets; we are going to be with my family for Xmas.
Re: the sources of her discomfort, they seems to be mostly twofold. One is my brother. He’s…a little odd, and I think perhaps he is slightly uncomfortable around my wife. Just shyness, I think. But between that and a few family emails from him in which she had been left off of the cc: list, she has a strong suspicion that he doesn’t like her. In my experience, she is hypersensitive - bordering on paranoid - about people not liking her or being mad at her. The email thing is explainable as simple forgetfullness, and his odd behavior just looks to me like the awkwardness of not having spent much time together (she and my brother have really only seen each other at Xmas gatherings like this). I haven’t asked my brother directly, but I do not believe he dislikes my wife.
She says the other source of discomfort is that spending Xmas with my family makes her miss her own family. They live in Japan, and she doesn’t get to see them very often (last fall was the first time in five years).
On top of all that, of course, is the “mi casa es no su casa” feeling I mentioned upthread, the feeling of not being truly, completely at home in someone else’s home. I can certainly empathize with that, but I wouldn’t have thought it could be so intense that someone would rather spend Christmas alone than with their in-laws.
as jsgoddess notes, “good” is a subjective thing, and I’m trying hard not to be judgmental about the reasons behind my wife’s comfort.
Does she want to go?
Just a thought, but if you skipped flying to your family some years, would it mean you could fly to see her family a little more often?
I have a friend who I used to work with who is married to a Korean woman. She is the nicest woman on earth. Both of their kids have learned the language through tutors.
The thing is I am almost certain that my friend doesn’t speak a word of Korean and really doesn’t spend a whole lot of time speaking with her Mother. She also has a very large family who come over a lot for gatherings where much food is served and visiting done. (almost all of it done in English)
I always thought it strange that a husband would feel comfortable with his wife and kids speaking in the house in a language that he himself doesn’t understand.
i’m thinking people feel uncomfortable with their in-laws because the other family really haven’t accepted the new spouse as “their own” or they over compensate and don’t give the new member time to adjust. fortunately i’ve never had that problem - never got married.
I’m comfortable around his mom, mainly because we recently moved near her and now see her once a week. I see everyone else once or twice a year amidst the holiday chaos so there’s never time to get to know each other or just relax. Two of his siblings are nice, it’s just never gotten to the stage where you can let your hair down and just be. He has one aunt I like a lot but she rarely comes around since she’s his mom’s ex-SIL. Otherwise it’s just his other aunt and sister, who are both wretched people that put everyone on edge before they dumped all of us (thank fucking god).
Back when this thread was started I was married, and I always enjoyed get-togethers with my wife’s family. I always said I like my in-laws more than my wife likes her parents. I don’t miss being married to my ex at all, but I do miss seeing her extended family. I still see some of them occasionally.
I get on very well with my in-laws. They’re on the East coast and we’re on the West coast, so we don’t see them as often anymore, but we’re all close and visiting them a few times a year is enjoyable and extremely relaxing. Them spending lots of time with our small children in the morning, meaning that I get to sleep in as a rare luxury, is absolutely blissful 
I remember going on a Panama canal cruise with my grandmother-in-law, father-in-law and sister-in-law (i.e. no actual spouse pairs). It was simply not my wife’s “turn” since she’d recently gone to Spain with said grandmother-in-law, and the rooms worked out better this way. I guess that is a little odd, but its nice to be able to get along so well that you have the freedom to do stuff like that.
My parents are much further away (very close to literally on the the other side of the earth) so my wife doesn’t get to see them that often. But they all get on well, and talk frequently on Skype. My mom stayed with us for approximately four months to help out and bond with each of our newborn children, something my wife sincerely appreciated.
So we’re very fortunate, and everyone gets along very well. I guess we’re blessed to be surrounded by well balanced, easy going people on both sides.
I get along OK with my in-laws and my husband gets along fine with my family. But we never, ever stay overnight with any of them. Most of them live close enough to go there for dinner and go home. One brother doesn’t - when we visit him, we stay at a hotel. We’ve gone on weekend trips and vacations with them - but we all get our own rooms, it never involves sharing a house. It’s not just the different bed etc - it’s that I don’t want to be social from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep. Not with his family, not with my family , not with our friends. I would rather spend the holidays along than three or four days at someone else’s house.
I got along fine with my in-laws from both my marriages but I get along well with most people and feel comfortable even when I am among mostly strangers. They were all decent enough people except for my second wife’s father - he was, and still is I imagine, a real dick. So I often used to avoid going on family visits to their place. I avoided as many as I could without it ever being an issue. Left to my own devices avoiding 100% would have been good. It wasn’t as though I had any trouble interacting with him he was just someone that I was happy to spend no time with.
This thread is a few years old now; sorry for not answering this back then. :smack:
Her family is in Japan. Traveling there once a year is about all we can handle, physically and financially, regardless of what we do for Christmas.
I started this thread in 2011. In 2013, we decided to stay home for Christmas - just the two of us. I missed my family, especially my parents; they are old and frail, and I know that someday soon there will be no more Christmases with them. But I’ve been making it a point to go and visit them several times throughout the year. So Christmas by ourselves was…alright. It felt sort of non-holiday somehow for me, maybe because I was missing all of the usual cues, e.g. travel, different surroundings/people, etc.
We’re staying home again this year. It’ll be alright again. I’ll see about visiting my parents (just me) in February or so.
My in-laws are a chore. There’s nothing to be comfortable with because they don’t extend themselves in any way.
My mother-in-law died before I met my husband; from what I hear of her, I’m sure we would have gotten along great. But my father-in-law is completely emotionally closed off. He acted uncomfortable at our wedding, and calls me “young lady” because he won’t use my name. He smokes like a chimney inside his tiny condo, even though my husband and his brother have told him that so long as he does that, they won’t visit him there. When we invite him to visit, he has nothing to say and won’t participate in any activities. My mother has him over for all the holiday meals, and he won’t even say “thank you” or “the food was good.” My mom and I are good cooks, too. The closest he has ever come to saying something positive to me was to tell me that a dinner I made “wasn’t bad at all” (he ate 3 giant helpings).
My husband’s brother lives halfway across the country. They were never close to start with. He’s married with 3 little kids. I actively dislike him. He only communicates with my husband during football season, or when he wants to use our house as a free hotel. When he shows up, he never expresses any gratitude for the meals I cook. Every time we have bought them a nice dinner out, he never says thank you, just complains about the food.
Worse, he tends to flat-out be a jerk. The last time he was here, he invited a friend of his over. The friend had a 3 year old daughter. Brother-in-law didn’t even tell us he was doing this. Then he volunteered me and his wife as a babysitter for all the kids without asking us. Then he invited the friend and his kid to stay the night without asking us. One time, we woke up in the morning to find he’d taken my husband’s car without asking. Another time, he borrowed the car late at night and didn’t close the garage door when he came back. Our neighborhood then was not so great and we were lucky nothing was stolen.
At the end of every visit, his wife drags him into the guest room, then makes him come out and apologize to us, enumerating all his misdeeds.
We have gone to visit them, mainly because his wife guilted us into it. She’s OK but after all that begging for us to visit, she and BIL barely spoke to us the whole time. I proposed an outing with the kids one day and BIL decided it wasn’t going to happen at the last minute…and he had parked us into his driveway, so my husband and I couldn’t leave the house, either. Both of them made us feel it was a chore to host us, and would constantly send us to play with the kids in the playroom so they could get regular housework done. We won’t be doing that trip again soon because I felt totally uncomfortable.
Not very comfortable. It’s not like I actively dislike them, but I don’t enjoy my time with them. It’s a chore that I have to do. Part of the reason is they stress me the hell out, my job can be pretty stressful and I like to use my time off to de-stress, so while I’m getting stressed out by them, I think about the fact that they’re adding to my stress while I should be destressing which stressed me out more. Add to the fact that they just moved much closer to us and it’s a wonder I don’t drink more than I do.
This Christmas, my wife is going to see them without me. I’m spending Christmas fly fishing. Then I’m going to get Chinese takeaway and binge watch Coen brother movies with my dog. it will be glorious.
Machine Elf, one of these Christmas’ you might consider letting your wife spend the day alone.
Sorry for the double post, but these two quote are quite telling:
Your wife explicitly told you that she didn’t want to go to your house for Christmas and you’ve dismissed it. Personally, I can totally understand why she wants to be alone, but even if you can’t grasp her reasons, can’t you grasp that it’s something she wants? If you’re her husband and can so easily disregard her needs, she probably doesn’t relish being surrounded by your family who aren’t even aware of her needs.
ETA: You don’t tell your wife her happiness is important to you, you show her that it’s important to you through action.
and
This is straight up emotional blackmail. If she doesn’t come, she’ll ruin Christmas and reduce your mother to tears. So basically, your wife’s needs will never come first unless she pitches a bigger fit than your mother. That’s probably why she wants some alone time.
And now I’ve triple replied to a fucking zombie.
See post #25, in which I recount staying home for Christmas in 2013 and again this year. This was not because she pitched a bigger fit than my mother.
“Difficult to grasp” is not the same as “silly and worthy of dismissal.” I can indeed forego understanding and simply be accepting. It’s just that understanding is a more pleasant state of affairs for me; it’s the reason I started this thread, to gather other people’s perspectives and opinions.
This DOES sound glorious!! A day of solitude in your own home would is a wonderful gift!
Instead, I will be dragged along to my SIL’s place for Christmas dinner. I don’t “not” get along with them, it’s just that I don’t see them but once or twice a year and it ends up being a bunch of small talk that I hate, and makes my introversion act-up. I usually assign myself kitchen clean-up duty early in the evening to give me something to do other than the small-talk.
Maybe it would be different if we saw them more, and had more to talk about. My wife even does not spend a lot of time with them thru the year. But, we seem to cling to this idea that the holidays are about family time and we are gonna have family time gaddamit!
My parents are gone and my brother is no option, so I don’t have much of an excuse to not go other than “I don’t want to”. That should be enough for most spouses, but not in my case. :mad: