Why do my in laws come between me and my partner?

Why does this feel like a row with my partner?

Because what stings is rarely the remark itself. It is where your partner was standing when it landed.

You can usually survive a comment about your cooking, your job, the way you are raising your child or how long it took you to learn Danish. What is much harder to survive is the silence beside you while it is said. In that silence something gets decided without anyone deciding it: this is a family where that is allowed, and you are the one who will have to absorb it.

So you raise it in the car on the way home, and the conversation goes wrong immediately, because you are talking about two different things. You are talking about being alone in a room full of people. Your partner hears an attack on people they love, and have loved far longer than they have loved you. Both of you are then defending something real, which is why these arguments can run for years without either of you being wrong.

What am I actually asking my partner to do?

Most people are not asking for a confrontation. They are asking to be held in mind while the difficult thing happens.

It is worth getting specific about this, because partners often hear a much larger demand than the one being made, and refuse it on those grounds. When I slow this down in a session, what people want usually comes down to 3 fairly modest things.

• To be warned. You want to know before you arrive that your partner’s mother has views about the christening, rather than discovering it over dessert.
• To be joined. Not defended, necessarily. A look across the table that says your partner heard it too is often enough to keep you in the room.
• To be released. You want it to be acceptable to leave at 4, or to skip one Sunday, without it becoming evidence about your character.

Say any of those out loud and they sound reasonable. The reason they rarely get said is that by the time you are upset enough to raise it, the request has hardened into something closer to an ultimatum, and your partner answers the ultimatum rather than the wish underneath it.

Why does my partner not see what I see?

You are meeting these people as an adult. Your partner is meeting them as someone who grew up in the room.

Children learn early what costs too much to notice. If a mother’s disappointment used to empty the whole house of air, a grown adult will often keep steering round it without any sense of steering. Your partner may not be pretending not to have heard the remark. There is a real possibility it did not register as a remark at all, because it sits inside a pattern that has been running since they were 6.

That asymmetry explains a lot of the loneliness in these arguments. You are asking your partner to see something they have spent a lifetime not seeing, and the request arrives as a demand to turn on the people who fed them. How a partner handles their own parents does seem to matter to the other one: in a survey of 422 married adults in one Chinese province, people who thought better of the way their spouse treated that spouse’s parents reported more satisfaction in the marriage.¹ It is one self-report study in one cultural setting, so I would not lean on it, except that it points at something I see constantly. The in-law problem lives between the 2 of you, not between you and them.

What if our 2 families expect completely different things?

Two families can both be loving and still disagree entirely about what love obliges you to do.

In Copenhagen I sit with a lot of couples where one grew up with the calendar: visits are arranged, Sunday belongs to whoever booked it, and independence is read as health. The other grew up where the door did not need knocking, where help arrives unasked and refusing it is the insult. Neither of them is doing family wrong. They are simply carrying instructions written in different houses.

The pain is sharper if you are the one who moved. Your family is far away and your partner’s family is the only one in the room, so the local version of normal wins by default, and your own sense of how a family should behave starts to feel like a private eccentricity. That is worth naming between you, because what looks like a fight about Christmas is often a much older grief about distance, and it does not get resolved by winning Christmas.

What can I do before the next visit?

Work on the agreement between the 2 of you first. Almost nothing you try with the family holds if that part is vague.

• Separate the 2 complaints. Write down what the family did, and what you wanted from your partner while they did it. Raise the second one.
• Ask for one thing, not for a new personality. One concrete request for one visit is far more likely to be met than a demand that your partner finally stand up to the family.
• Agree an exit beforehand. Knowing you can leave at a set time changes how the whole afternoon feels, usually before you need to use it.
• Put something back. Decide together what you will protect afterwards, an evening, a weekend away, so the family is not the only thing your calendar serves.

Those steps assume 2 things: that you and your partner are broadly on the same side, and that the difficulty with the family is rudeness, pressure or a clash of expectations rather than something more serious. Where a relative is being cruel in a sustained way, where your partner will not acknowledge any of it, or where you are being isolated from your own friends and family, this stops being a scheduling problem and the steps above will not touch it. That is the point at which I would want to sit with you properly, either on your own or in couples therapy in Copenhagen, rather than have you keep trying harder at home.

There is also an honest uncertainty here that I would rather leave standing. Some of these situations settle once the 2 of you are properly aligned, and some do not, because the family will not move and your partner cannot yet bear the cost of asking them to. Knowing which of those you are in usually takes a few conversations, and it is a far more useful thing to find out than who was right about the last visit.

Questions people ask

Is this really something to bring to therapy?

Yes, and it is one of the more common things couples bring. It is seldom only about the family, which is exactly why it is hard to settle at home.

Should I come alone or with my partner?

Either works, and coming alone first is a perfectly good start. It suits people who want to get clear on what they are asking for before they ask for it.

Will you tell me to cut the family off?

No, that is not my decision to make and it is rarely what people want. Most of the work goes into what contact you both want and what has to change for it to be bearable.

We come from different cultures. Will that be understood?

Yes, and most of the couples I see in Copenhagen are mixed in some way. I take the difference seriously without treating your nationality as the explanation for everything that happens between you.

What if my partner refuses to come?

Then come on your own, and expect it to be useful rather than second best. How you raise things and what you do with the answer are both yours to work on, and they change what comes back.

If family keeps coming between you, I help you both draw a line you can stand behind together in couples therapy.

Sources

1. Expectation and evaluation of spouse’s filial piety and marital satisfaction in China. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.