Parents, Take Note: Advice Doesn’t Help Couples

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Reader’s Question

I have recently become engaged to my partner of 5 years and moved to a different country for an excellent job opportunity for my fiancé. Recently we visited my family and stayed with my parents, and we ended up having arguments before the holiday was up. My fiancé and I have no intentions to move back to my home town in the near future, in fact we hope to move to my partner’s home country when this current contract expires. With this in mind, we want to sell a few of our things from our life in my home town and save a bit of money. My parents called us “stupid” and “childish” for wanting to sell our things, and created such drama about it. I think they are just upset that we are not planning on moving back to my home town any time soon. My parents have always told me what they thought I should do, and then said “we give you advice, but you do what you want”. Then they tell me 10 more times, until it gets to the point that they are insisting. I have often wondered if I have done things because I really wanted to, or because I was convinced it was the right thing to do. As a 27-year-old woman, I am only now starting to see the light.

Since this holiday, they have now turned on my fiancé, suggesting that he is manipulating me and is controlling. Their only example was my partner convincing me to go for a run with him when I was feeling particularly lazy.

Seriously. I haven’t spoken to them since this revelation.

I am trying really hard to break free and instill some boundaries with them.

They are good people, just a little nuts, and I don’t know how to deal with them. Their controlling ways have left me unable to make important decisions by myself. I feel so stressed and confused about important choices — for example our wedding — and I think it stems from years of helpful parental ‘advice’. My fiancé has asked me so many times what I want for our wedding, and every time my answer is different. What I really want is to elope, but we would be killed!

I just don’t know how to get my parents to understand that their ‘advice’ is no longer welcome.

Psychologist’s Reply

It may be difficult for your parents to understand, but if they really want you to succeed in marriage as well as your adult relationship with them, here is a secret. Advice doesn’t help couples. Couples succeed by learning how to make their lives and their marriage in their own image. Advice, especially unwelcome advice, adds stress to the relationship, as you’ve very clearly said. It stresses everyone out, makes the young couple feel like they are not trusted to make up their own minds, and risks their own relationship with you.

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If they really want to help you as their (adult) child, then they can tactfully make you aware of a concern and then step back and watch how you manage it. If you make a mistake, then they let you make your own mistake. Successful couples manage unsolvable problems all the time. When families trust each other to do what is best for them, then they empower each other to live well, live fully, and live appreciatively.

I assume from your brief description that they do want what is best for you. If, on the other hand, they resist seeing you as an adult woman capable of making your own choices, then it falls to you to relate to them as they are without trying to educate them to the fact that you are not a child any more. How can you do that? Preferably in a way that does not push them out of your lives. Pushing them away may be the easiest thing to do, but the thought of it obviously causes you distress. One way to accomplish this is to try to bring some humor into the picture.

There is a reason that the the genre of mother-in-law jokes is the largest category in humor. We need humor to disarm the threatening influence of someone so close. As long as a relationship is not truly abusive, then see if there is a way to lighten it up. This is not to discourage you from developing your boundaries with them, only to help you maintain those boundaries without going nuclear and distancing yourself from them emotionally as you relocate and distance yourself from them physically. Although we typically hear about mother-in-law stories (because it’s safer and more necessary for the newcomer in the family to find a way to fit in), they can be adapted to fit one’s own mother easily enough.

For example, here is an old joke that gets the message across in the guise of a joke:

At a senior citizen’s meeting, a couple was celebrating their 50th anniversary. The husband stood up and was telling story of his dating habits in his youth. It seemed that every time he brought home a girl to meet his mother, his mother didn’t like her. So, finally, he started searching until he found a girl who not only looked like his mother and acted like his mother, she even sounded like his mother. So he brought her home one night to have dinner, and his father didn’t like her.

With this we are reminded that we are all open to criticism. It sends the message without being overly offensive. It gives your mother an opportunity to crack a daughter or son-in-law joke and release some of her pent-up frustration. For example, here is some Mother to daughter advice:

Cook a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
But teach a man to fish and you get rid of him for the whole weekend.

She gets to make a little dig with a socially acceptable disguise, blows off some steam, and then you are all free to go about your business.

In the meantime, as you develop a sense of humor about this, I encourage you to continue to work with your fiancé to develop a United Front. You two are a couple now, and you can demonstrate that to your parents in the way you behave and support each other.

This is one of many considerations in blending original families. There is a more thorough discussion of this and other issues in the chapter on “Marrying the In-Laws” in my book Of Sound Mind to Marry.

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