Only if I am expected to fuck them too.
I’ve both been the despised one and had a spouse my parents disliked. It is not a happy-making situation. Maybe not a dealbreaker, but certainly close.
It turned out to be, when he called off the wedding because his parents didn’t approve of me (they hadn’t met me before we got engaged due to distance issues).
In retrospect, I’m grateful. Talk about spineless!
It really depends on how the family dynamic is. If the family is together all the time, all the siblings live in the same neighborhood, everyone comes over for Sunday dinner, etc, then it obviously would be a huge deal if the family didn’t like you.
But if they are not close either geographically or emotionally, it’s not necessarily a big deal at all. I know plenty of people who see their in-laws, at most, a couple of times a year. Hell I haven’t even spoken to mine since the wedding (18 mos ago). They like me fine, but nothing would be different if they didn’t.
It’s SO helpful when hostile parents live far away. If they’re nearby, you are screwed. I found it was for the best if I went to visit MY relatives alone or with the kid on weekends, and HE went to visit HIS relatives (with the kid, as motivation) on weekends. Just because you are married, you DO NOT have to function as a one unit, side by side like conjoined twins. If the relatives don’t like your company, you don’t have to go visit with your spouse! Holidays you can alternate - Easter, his mom’s, Thanksgiving, your mom’s, Christmas, one day your mom’s and the next day his. In theory. In a just world, a married couple could just stay in their own home and have their own holiday and let whoever wanted to, come and visit. But the problem with that was all the other relatives - the aunts, the uncles, the cousins - didn’t want to come out to visit US, they were, OF COURSE, having the holiday dinner at the parents’. And we had a kid who wanted to spend time with the extended family. Not just the three of us sitting around staring at each other in our own house!
Mr. Sali’s mother thought he made a poor choice in marrying me, though she was always very polite and we could sit and talk for hours. Eventually she warmed up and would have been a super grandmother, had she (Mr. S’s mom) not died when daughter turned 4. My own mother doesn’t care for Mr. Sali much at all as he doesn’t put up with a lot of controlling shit and isn’t “down to earth” enough for her tastes. He will journey out to my mother’s on major holidays ONLY, since we have a daughter who wants to visit her grandma, so three or four times a year is his absolute limit. And they are very polite to each other, also, but after the food and the visit and the digestion process, we go home without a long goodbye. We have our own holiday dinner and friends over the next day.
This is what I was going to say. But proximity does make a difference too. My in-laws don’t disapprove of me at all–they’re just hard to live with in general–but we decided years ago that we would never live within a 30-min. drive of them. It’s been a good thing.
In-law approval is nice to have, but it’s not a must-have.
As others have before me have said, the dealbreaker would be about how my spouse dealt with it, whether he was willing to side with me and stand by his decision to spend the rest of his life with me.
Family dynamics also play a part. My own family is split over three countries and we rarely see each other. However some families have siblings and parents living on the same street and are much more involved in each other’s lives.