Longtime lurker, almost-never poster here, looking for some psychological insights from you wonderful and widely-experienced people.
I often find myself feeling sad or disappointed in my family when I want something (such as, eating dinner together) and, while they may be willing to do it, they don’t particularly want to. Eating dinner together is nice, but to me the pleasure diminishes greatly when it’s preceded by having to call people four times to get them to come down and when they don’t want to stay long when they’re there. My husband is the same way: we’ll do things together (for instance, see a play), but I often have the feeling that he’s doing these things only because I want to or asked to–left to his own devices, he wouldn’t bother. When we talk about this, he admits that my impression is correct but he also says he enjoys what we do. It doesn’t seem that way, though–it seems like he’s humoring me.
When I constantly feel like I’m the only one with any enthusiasm for family activities like these, the enthusiasm dribbles away. The other night my youngest child (8) asked if we could do family game night, which I think would be fun and would love to do, but I’m hesitant even to ask the other kids (14 and 16) and my husband.
Has anyone else dealt with this in family relationships? What did you do about it?
Ultimately, the best you can do is respect diversity, and celebrate everyone’s individuality. Find out what makes them happy, and, to the limits of your ability, indulge them.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
In the best case, they’ll reciprocate. If you grit your teeth and go to the boring old driving range with Uncle Steve, maybe he’ll be willing to grit his teeth and go to a concert with you.
Also, explore “least common denominator” options. When a bunch of people can’t agree on where to go for dinner…go to Denny’s. There will be something on the menu that everyone will be willing to eat. If you absolutely cannot make everybody happy…make everyone the least unhappy as you can.
As the parent in the family, sometimes you have to dictate. If families were complete democracies with the kids always getting a vote, there are many things they would never experience. I’m not say it has to be this way with every family decision, but some things you just say, we’re going to do this ________!!! As a parent, you can’t always expect immediate grateful response. It normally comes later, many times much later.
My 21 year old, expresses many times now, how grateful he is that I or his step mom, made us all do certain things when he was growing up. He has learned to appreciate the wisdom that we had in making certain decisions that affected him as a kid. The same goes for things between my wife and I.
Don’t get so hung up on the immediate response/feedback loop.
I’m perfectly happy with other people going along with my proposals, and also going along with theirs. I have discovered lots of new and interesting things that way, and even if I end up not liking whatever that much, it’s still nice to be doing things together.
Ideally the situation shouldn’t be completely one-sided, but from your own telling it isn’t: right now, your youngest came up with a proposal but, as the Supreme Leader, figured it was best to check with you first and that if you agreed you’d handle the rest.
How often do other family members propose things? It’s possible that you happen to be the most social one, or simply the one most likely to speak up.
Some of the things you mention are quite alien to me because for example in my family meals have always been a group thing. There are family tales about that great-grandmother who had a total of 10 kids between steps and own, who would ring a bell, go inside, start serving… and if you hadn’t moved quickly enough, you could find your chicken submerged inside your soup. My mother once famously got fed up with my brother’s “one minute… one minute…” and unplugged the computer from the wall: he hasn’t “one minuted” for a meal in the 30 years since.
At our house this was referred to as “Happy Family Memories, Dammit”. Sunday night we did something together. Played games or cards or something like that. There was a certain amount of kvetching, but we did it anyway, always saying “you will thank us later”.
One of the things I really liked about the Harry Potter series is that it was something we all genuinely enjoyed, so we would take turns reading a chapter aloud to each other. One of the high points of my life was when my son or daughter would say, “Can we do just one more chapter?”
Dinner together was a different matter. It was taken for granted that we had dinner together whenever anyone was available. That was How Things Are.
Finding something everyone really likes is the hard part. Sometimes just finding something everyone will go along with, as seems often to be your experience, has to be enough.
The point is to spend time where nobody in on their phone, nobody is on the Internet, and you are looking at each other, not a TV screen.
My wife and I are like this. Some things we do some things together because we both truly enjoy them, some things we don’t together because one of us would rather get a tooth pulled, and some things we do together where one of us is not so much into it but we still enjoy being with each other, and I can at least say in my case I’m happy to go along and see my wife enjoying herself.
It’s going to be unusual in a relationship where everyone shares all the same interests, sometimes people support each other because that’s what you do, sometimes it’s nothing more than a trade, I go with you to this thing I find boring because you’ll go with me to something you find boring. Sometimes I go with my wife to some social event I can’t stand because I know she wants everyone to see what a wonderful handsome, intelligent, charming husband she has, and sometimes she comes somewhere with me because I can’t stand women hitting on me all the me*. There’s a whole spectrum of reasons to share activities beyond it being the first choice for everyone involved.
*Those are the reasons I assume, I suppose there’s a remote possibility it’s something else.
Katt Williams had a bit in one of his shows which compared being a parent with the Electoral College. You can take your kids’ votes, but you still have the ability to decide something completely different.
We try to combine activities so that everyone is happy. I hate shopping, but my gf occasionally would like me to accompany her (mostly to carry heavy stuff). So, we go shopping with a pre-agreed time limit, after which we go to a brewery for some beer sampling.
My husband loves motorcycles and I hate them with a very hating hate - not so great that I’d want them banned from the universe, but enough that if I was never asked to go to another bike show or HOG chapter dinner, I could live happily. I used to ride with him occasionally and I tried to find something about it to enjoy, but it was loud and uncomfortable and I don’t trust cars when on a bike. I don’t want to learn to ride. I don’t want to sit in a sidecar. I wish that Harley wasn’t in our garage, but there you go.
He, on the other hand, hates to take cruises. He finds them boring, he doesn’t like the crowds, he’s not interested in the shipboard activities, unless they’d let him hang out in the engine room.
But we work it out. I will occasionally go to bike shows. I help him with his bike (which I no longer have to ride because he reconfigured it without the passenger seat.) And he’s admitted he’d probably enjoy cruising thru the Panama Canal, so that’s on our list. Luckily, there are other things we enjoy in common and other things we hate in common. All in all, it works.
This is basically my philosophy when hanging out with friends, although I don’t want anyone to grit their teeth to go along with me. I’m hoping for at least a shrug and “what the hell, sure I’ll go”. And if someone invites me to do something where I would have to grit my teeth the whole time, I’ll politely turn them down, but if it’s something where I might or might not enjoy it, but I’ll enjoy at least spending time with my friend, then I’ll say yes.
I would suggest something like this: over a two-month cycle, each person gets to pick an activity for the night by decree, and the family votes and does a consensus activity for the remaining weeks of the cycle.
Another idea is to make it a free-form night. Everyone has to be in the same room doing an activity that allows for interaction with the other people, but if you have a board game on one side and some scrap-bookers on the other side, call it a win. Something like a crackling fire seems to be a great central feature to a night like this.
In general, though, you can’t control how other people feel. If they are doing things you like because they like you, that’s really everything you can ask for. Don’t see it as a negative, see it as a positive. After all, if not for doing things out of love that you don’t really enjoy (changing diapers for example) there’d be no families at all.
One of my former partners was very oriented toward homemaking and traditional things, such as putting a full dinner on the table every night – just for the two of us.
By nature, I’m a snacker and forager and I hate cooking (and suck at it). When I’m on my own I usually eat a big lunch and then have a few snacks in the evening. She was a great cook, but she also worked full-time+ and would come home exhausted and grouchy, but intent on cooking, sitting down at the table, and thoroughly scrubbing the kitchen after dinner. All in all, it was a two-three hour event every evening that largely caused fights: I wasn’t very hungry and didn’t want to clean-up the kitchen after a long day at work and she wanted to fulfill some “Leave it to Beaver” dinner fantasy EVERY night.
We differed on many other things as well and ultimately broke-up, but these differing wants and needs concerning dinner pretty much represent the difficulty of making someone else bow to one’s own needs. I thought she was monomaniacal and rigid and she thought I was selfish and thoughtless.
Thanks, all, for your replies… this has been really helpful to me. Shodan, I love “Happy Family Memories, Dammit”–that’s exactly how I feel sometimes and I think joking about it would help.
I empathise with your situation. Being Alpha Dog all the time is hard yards - at least, if you’re not the personality type that actually enjoys being in charge as a general thing.
One thing I would say - it’s easier with a fellow-officer. It sounds like your spouse is not being your fellow-officer for things like family meals and doing things together … which is sad. Two herding three is infinitely easier than one herding four.
But at least for the games night idea you’ve already got your ally - the eight-year-old. “Don’t feel you have to do it for me! Do it for your little sibling! How could you disappoint that little cherubic eight-year-old-face…” Or that’s roughly the way it plays out in my head, anyway
To be honest, there’s not much you can do about this. If they’re not enthusiastic, they’re just not. They may, in fact, feel that they are being imposed upon by you.
(I’ve been on both sides of this dynamic before - yeah, it’s unhappy for everyone involved.)
I’m pretty sure I posted about this same topic before. My partner and I have very different interests and, while I will go along with pretty much anything he wants, he gets frustrated that I’m not as excited about it as he is. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. You should be happy that people love you enough to do what you want even though it doesn’t necessarily appeal to them. (Unless they whine the entire time!)
