About those in-laws...
Sooner or later, every married couple has “the talk” about the in-laws. You know, those people that you wouldn't have anything to do with unless your hair burst into flames while you were waiting for a bus?
Just about every married couple everywhere has in-laws. That's because the very first time people stood to inherit land, or money or a heraldic title identifying who had a familial connection by marriage – and therefore stood in line to inherit – was beyond important.
These days unless a person is in line to inherit land or a fortune or a heraldic title, that connection has less to do with the laws of inheritance and more to do with the immediate family of a person's spouse.
Assuming that the person to whom one is – or is about to be – married grew up in a household containing at least one parent and maybe a sibling or two, the match involves at least one parent-in-law and perhaps one or more siblings-in-law.
By all outward appearances, mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law and brothers- and sisters-in-law from both families seem to get along just fine.
In truth they just tolerate one another. And that's not guaranteed when they are in the same room for Christmas Eve dinner, for instance.
The other real truth is that they don't like you very much.
Your mother-in-law is sure you are not good enough to marry her son or daughter. Your brother-in-law resents the fact you might have plans that would prevent his brother from watching a Sunday afternoon football game, and your sister-in-law resents the fact that you went to college instead of working as a telephone operator until you got married.
As for your spouse, nothing you ever cook tastes as good as his mother's And as for you? Nobody was ever as smart, kind, brave and protective as your Father.
It is all inescapable.
Even so, as in-laws go, I've been pretty lucky.
My Dutch ones all lived in The Netherlands and were the perfect distance to make our – or their- visits to and fro international holidays.
My current batch is after 25 years getting used to me.
And my husband, who is not technically an in-law but from that in-law family, thought it would be great fun being married to a journalist – until he actually was married to a journalist.
That goes for the rest of his family, too.
What can you do?
As for his in-laws: I have no brothers or sisters and my parents were gone before he burst onto the scene.
And my Dutch family – my niece and her now adult kids – live in Holland so their visit every five years is, of course, an international holiday.
So I guess since none of us is going to inherit a fortune or heraldic title, we've been making the most of it for the past 25 years.
And I guess we'll keep doing it for the next 25...I hope.