My brothers and I are very close. BrotherA's wife and I had some serious issues a few years back, and there's a LOT of mistrust as a result, but it seems to be getting better. At one point she told BrotherA that it was me or her. She didn't like his answer when he called her bluff. RE: In-laws. I've never had in-laws that liked me. I have red hair. I'm too young. I have children. Whatever. The Guy and I are a mixed religion couple. If you could call it that. He was raised Jew-ish. Reformed Judaism seemed to suit his mother, so he and his brother were raised in that faith. His mom's a fairly nice person, but I'm not in her top ten favorite people. He's done a fairly excellent job of standing up for me and not letting her treat me too much like crap...but I know it stresses him out. I've made a point not to feed into the situation by simply being polite, civil, and not engaging more than I have to. edit: Just saw the post about mom going where kid goes. We do have to deal with that...and I'm not looking forward to it. She expects that if/when The Guy moves anywhere, she's going to have a place in the household. No. Fucking. Way.
Remind me not to visit your place. The point of hospitality is to welcome someone into your home, not to have them conform to your exacting lifestyle and then judging them for every transgression against it.
Maybe I'm completely out of line with what I'm going to say. Or maybe my stable family (including extended) has skewed my views, but holy Christ, guys! Those of you who have pushy, unlikable family members or inlaws that are there three or four times per week bothering you? Tell them to go away. We have one or two nutbags in my family that, for whatever reason, cause people stress. One is (I swear) a borderline-personality disorder addict. Another is a drama queen of the highest order. What we do is simply not invite them to family functions. Or not engage them in any way. My father is probably the bluntest of us all, and he's not above saying, "Listen, you aren't welcome here. Fuck off until you can change your attitude." And poof! The stress goes away. Or, at least, is greatly reduced. The beauty of being an adult is that you no longer have to put up with relatives because someone said so. Clean the garbage out of your lives.
Hospitality is about making people feel welcome, but it's a two-way street. One of the MIL's complaints is that the girl publicly insulted her family in a bar. You never insult your hosts, ever. That should just be common sense. The rest seems pretty normal to me as well. The bride-to-be sounds like an uncouth, spoiled brat. Not saying the MIL sounds like a peach herself, but bad guests are insufferable. Realizing you're about to spend a lifetime with one would make me a bitch too.
Guests are one thing, but a fiance on the eve of the nuptials is a fucking family member. Getting pissed over her taking seconds without being offered? Next thing you know she'll be fucking your son!
All I can envision is the kid and his father smoking a cigar in the back yard, with the father chuckling, saying "she's more like your mother than you know... good luck with that". They both sound like they have issues, and I couldn't care less. I pity their eventual kids.
Oh, come on. First of all, let's appreciate the irony of someone who says this, within almost the same breath, saying this: Secondly, we don't know what was said. An insult in a pub? Where the entire pub was shocked at what she said about her family? Something tells me it didn't quite go down like that. And then there's the bit about the food: I come from a good Italian family. Not taking second helpings of food would be a greater insult than taking a second helping before official permission has been given (and hearing that someone hasn't had enough food is a far greater indictment of the host than the manners of the guest). And any host ought to be considerate of their guest's tastes. If she's vegetarian, or does she really not enjoy a particular type of food, you should work around that. If you're not willing to work around it, then you shouldn't have invited her over in the first place.i
My last girlfriend's family didn't like me, though they never expressed it to me directly. However, the reason was because while they were all doing things with their lives, she stayed living in Clearwater working food service jobs until she was 24, and then finally decided to pursue her own goals when she moved to Tallahassee, so they resented that decision more than me specifically. You could tell she was the black sheep of the siblings and they viewed her doing her own thing as abandoning them. How do I know she was the black sheep? After the first time I met them, they told her they liked me but that I was too good looking for her (I'm a 7, 7.5 at best in the right light and photoshopped) and I'd hurt her, only further developing the insecurities they'd helped develop all her life.
Here is an interview the couple did. Might explain some stuff. Or might not, since the Daily Mail is a tabloid. Regardless, this is all stupid.
I'm just chiming in to say that my (initially lower-middle and now just middle class) brother married into a family of millionaires. The in-laws are: gentle, lovely people; self-effacing; very friendly; they absolutely dote on the grandkids; and are very generous (i.e., giving them $50k towards a house as a wedding present, and loaning them the other $800k at 0.0% interest). Also, they have one of the cutest dogs I've ever seen. So yeah, I recommend marrying people with awesome in-laws.
How in the name of fuck is a middle class person with kids ever going to pay this off on TOP of a mortgage? Is it really a loan or do you think they have written the money off? Or is your perception of middle class a half mil a year income?
In my mother's case specifically, it's some weird cultural bastard relative of filial piety at work, where backtalk is a bigger sin than murder. "Adult" doesn't enter into it. Thank fuck I'm planning to get as far away from that shit as I can. Hell, that's assuming they're buying a house for more than $850k. Now that would be a lack of common sense...
Ahahaha. You Americans / Canadians and your wacky house pricing, with houses under $300k. Our house prices have dropped substantially for the last 4 years. Check out the median house prices for my city as of this year - link . $800k was one of the cheapest houses in their suburb when they got the house 4 or so years ago. The suburb is pleasant without being rich. The dream of home ownership for single wage families is basically dead here, if it ever lived in the first place. Oh, and my brother is the state marketing manager for a major mining company - he earns bank, but not 'retire at 40' bank, so I consider him middle class. Back on focus: a previous girlfriend's mother had been sexually assaulted when she came off the boat as a refugee in Australia. She just loved Australian men, especially those who were fucking her daughter. That was a very unpleasant time in my life.