My son and I are particularly close and have always enjoyed a loving friendship and understanding of each other, despite him living and working overseas for the past 13 years. We’ve always communicated regularly via various channels. After my father – his dear Opa – passed away in 2019, he partnered for the first time. We were overjoyed that he’d found love and while Covid restrictions kept us apart and communication became a little more intermittent, we remained connected.
Since travelling again and meeting his partner, things have drastically altered. His partner has taken quite an obvious dislike of my husband and me. We have tried everything we know in the playbook of respecting a new relationship, while maintaining our own, but nothing is working. He is perfectly fine with us without his partner, however we are all on eggshells when she is present. Cultural differences aside, we simply do not understand. I feel I should ask her if there’s anything specific I may have done to cause her disdain, however I am being dissuaded by those I love and trust. Mostly to “not make waves” or cause others’ social discomfort.
I feel I’m losing my son by the day and my heart is broken. I cry randomly on trains. I simply don’t know how to manage this.
Eleanor says: You sound bereft about this in a way that makes me hope very much that it will change. Not everyone earns a close relationship with their adult children, so to have one and feel it slipping away – it’s no wonder you’re crying on trains.
I understand why people are counselling you not to make waves. There’s a risk that by talking about this, you reify the fact that you don’t get on. By asking whether there’s a conflict, you accidentally start one.
But if you don’t “make waves”, what will happen? Will the situation change by itself? It doesn’t sound like there’s much reason to expect it will. This sounds like a moment for the old truism: “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”
And there’s a way to have this conversation that isn’t just: “She doesn’t like us, and we feel rejected.” It doesn’t need to alienate your son by making him feel torn between his partner and his parents.
Perhaps you could start by talking to him instead of her. It sounds like you feel less at risk of being misunderstood when you’re speaking alone with him. What about saying something like: “We’d love to feel close and at-ease when she’s around, like she’s part of the family too – do you agree that it doesn’t quite feel like that? What can we do to help?”
Try really hard to be genuinely open to the answer. You said “cultural differences aside, we do not understand”. But maybe cultural differences aren’t aside.
Differences in class, race, religion or upbringing can feel very salient when you’re meeting the in-laws. Especially if hers is the kind of difference that has marked her out for hostility in the past.
If she’s from a migrant family, or a different religion, or a different socioeconomic bracket, what’s felt like a lovely family dinner to you might in some ways feel unwelcoming to her. Or perhaps someone unknowingly made her feel judged, or conspicuously out of place in her partner’s world. I have no reason to think that did happen, but in trying to get to the bottom of this, it is important to be open to the possibility that it did.
If he says he doesn’t see the issue, you could try to communicate a little of what you’ve said here about how you’ve been feeling. It can be easy to retain the childlike idea that parents are invincible and can roll with anything, tolerate anything. It might not occur to him how much it hurts you to be distant. Learning a bit about your sense of grief might move your son to level with you.
In-law dynamics have all kinds of complexities. It can be hard for parents to accept no longer being the closest relationship in their child’s life. And it can be hard for partners to accept that there’s a family history, a closeness and a version of their loved one that they’ll never totally access. These complications can combine into a nasty Freudian play if we let them.
Or they can be surmounted with time and careful communication. Without those things, they’re unlikely to be surmounted at all.
This question has been edited for length
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