What do you call your in-laws?

In My Humble Opinion
41

The way I was raised, I find it VERY uncomfortable to call a person of my parents’ generation by their first name. It was always “Mr. Astaire” or “Mrs. Rogers,” never “Fred and Ginger.”

But, I also would have a REAL hard time doing what my parents’ generation does, which is refer to their MIL and FIL as “mom” and “dad.” They’re NOT my mom and dad. They’re my wife’s mom and dad, and there’s a big difference.

There’s also a third factor: I’m not the kind of person that usually ever mentions the name of the person I’m addressing, unless I have to get their attention from across the room. If I’m having a one-on-one conversation with Fred Astaire, I would never say, “So, Fred, tell me about this dancing thing you’re into.” It would just be, “So, tell me about this dancing thing you’re into.” Repeating people’s names in the middle of a conversation seems weird to me. That’s the sort of thing you do at the start of a conversation, maybe. (Or in dialogue in novels, to keep the characters straight; not in real life.)

So here’s the result of all of those factors:

  • When in direct conversation with my in-laws, I never mention their names at all.
  • When talking about them with other people, I usually say, “Mr. and Mrs. Astaire,” or “your mom and dad” (when addressing my wife).
  • When I do have to get their attention from across the room, I, very uncomfortably, use their first names. “Fred! Do you want a beer?”
42

First names.

My SO’s mom remarried a younger guy…so his step-dad is only like 4 years older than me. It would feel REALLY odd to call him something other than his first name.

43

I call my FIL by his first name.

I call my MIL “MWM” - sounds like “mom” with a “w” sound (Like “Mawam”). It stands for “My wife’s mother” and came from a long joking discussion over many years about this topic. SHe likes it, and so do I.

My wife calls my parents by their first names.

44

I come from a culture where virtually everyone is adressed by their first name, so that’s how I speak to my inlaws, as well as to my wife’s grandmothers. The only time I call them something else is when my FIL and son are together - the latter is named after the former, so to avoid confusion I call them “Big Raffi” and “Little Raffi”.

45

My father always addresses my grandmother (his mother-in-law) in the formal Russian manner, first name + patronymic. We all emigrated from Ukraine (well, USSR) to the States.