In-laws and boundaries: families of origin in a relationship

“Mum asked again whether we’re coming for Christmas. I said we’d see.”

She looks at him across the kitchen table. Last year they spent Christmas with his family and New Year with hers, and argued in the car three times in between. This year she wanted them to stay at home, just the two of them. She told him so back in November. So “we’ll see” means something very specific: he hasn’t told his mother yet. And she knows that in two weeks she will hear: “You know what she’s like. We’ll just go for lunch, then come home.”

The scene is a composite, but anyone who has ever lived as part of a couple will recognise some version of it. The mother-in-law who has a key to the flat and uses it. The father-in-law who is “just helping” with the renovation and ends up deciding what the tiles will look like. The daughter who rings her mother every evening to tell her why she and her partner fell out. When two people build a life together, they do not only connect with each other. They bring two families into the relationship — with their habits, expectations, holidays, old grudges and unwritten rules about who owes what to whom.

In this post I will write about why boundaries with your families of origin are among the most common themes in couples therapy, what differentiation has to do with it, why loyalty pulls at us so strongly, and how you can set boundaries as a couple without losing anyone along the way.

Two families, one new system

In family therapy we see the family as a system: a whole in which every part affects all the others. I wrote about this in more detail in The family as a system. When two people decide to share a life, it is not only a new relationship that comes into being. A new system appears, one that still has to find its boundaries — and two old families have to rearrange themselves a little around it.

Salvador Minuchin, the founder of structural family therapy, wrote about the boundaries between a family’s subsystems. A boundary can be clear: permeable enough for contact to be possible and firm enough for each subsystem to have its own space. It can be diffuse: everyone knows everything about everyone, decisions are made together, and feelings spill over from one household into another. Or it can be rigid: there is almost no contact, and everyone stays shut inside their own world.

A young couple has to learn something that is not written down anywhere. What used to be self-evident — that I tell Mum everything, that we go to Grandma’s every Sunday, that Dad decides about money — is no longer just my business. Now there is someone else who has an equal right to an opinion. And that someone grew up in a family where the rules were completely different.

It matters what this picture does not say. It does not say that parents should be pushed away. It says that a couple has an inside — a space where the two of you agree on things first and only then pass them on.

Why it so often gets stuck with the mother-in-law

Mother-in-law jokes are almost as old as marriage itself. But there is something real behind them. The British psychologist Terri Apter spent many years researching relationships between daughters- and sons-in-law and their partners’ parents. In her research, more than 60% of women reported that their partner’s mother had caused them long-term stress, compared with only around 15% of men.

Apter does not look for the explanation in “wicked mothers-in-law”. She finds it in the fact that two women often end up in an unclear role beside the same man: one who looked after him for twenty or thirty years, and another who is now building a home with him. Each has her own sense of how things are done properly. Each can easily feel pushed aside. And the man in the middle often withdraws because he does not know whose side to take — which both women read as him having taken the other one.

Of course, the same story can unfold between a son-in-law and his mother-in-law, a daughter-in-law and her father-in-law, or two men who disagree about how the farm should be run. Gender is not the point. The point is that two claims to closeness are placed in the same space and nobody has said clearly where the line between them runs.

Research also shows that tension with a partner’s parents is not just an unpleasant extra. Bryant, Conger and Meehan followed couples over several years and found that discord with in-laws was linked to a later decline in marital satisfaction and stability. Not because a mother-in-law breaks up a marriage, but because every unresolved conflict outside the couple sooner or later becomes a conflict inside it.

Differentiation: staying close and remaining yourself

For what happens between a couple and their families of origin, family therapy has a concept developed by the psychiatrist Murray Bowen: differentiation. It is the capacity to stay in emotional contact with the people close to you while remaining yourself — to feel what others feel without taking it on as your own; to hear your mother’s disappointment without changing a decision you made together with your partner.

Bowen described differentiation as a scale. At one end is fusion: the emotions of the whole family flow into each individual, disagreement is experienced as betrayal, every step back as an attack. At the other end there is not, as you might expect, complete independence, but emotional cutoff — a distance that looks like independence but is really just another way of avoiding tension. Someone who has not spoken to their parents for ten years is not necessarily more differentiated than someone who rings them three times a day.

For a couple this matters because each partner brings their own level of differentiation into the relationship. If one is closely fused with their family and the other feels there is always a third person in the marriage, a cycle begins: the more one complains, the more the other defends and the tighter they cling to their own. If you are interested in how differentiation develops over a long relationship, read When your partner grows in another direction as well.

Loyalty: the invisible ledgers between generations

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the pioneers of family therapy, noticed something everyone knows from experience: families keep a kind of ledger. Who gave what to whom, who sacrificed for whom, who is still owed something. He called this invisible loyalties. They are not written down anywhere, yet they bind us more tightly than many a contract.

When an adult child sets a boundary with their parents, these ledgers often wake up. “After everything we have done for you.” Or, more quietly, inside the person themselves: “Mum was alone when Dad left. How can I tell her now that we’re not coming?” Loyalty like this is not a mistake. It is an expression of gratitude and love. But when it is unconscious, it can stretch a person between two allegiances — to the partner and to the parents — in such a way that they cannot truly follow either.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, this is one of the central threads: what we have not worked through in our family of origin repeats itself in new relationships. That is why choosing a partner is not random — I wrote about this in Why we choose partners who remind us of our parents — and why a quarrel with a mother-in-law is often not just a quarrel with a mother-in-law. It is also a quarrel with the old rules you carry with you, and with the question of where you really belong.

Holidays: where everything shows

If you want to know how the boundaries between a couple and their families of origin are set, look at how they agree on the holidays. Christmas, Easter, birthdays, a first communion, the pig-slaughter feast at your uncle’s. Holidays are rituals that tell a family who belongs to it and where its centre is. So it is not only about where lunch will be. It is about whose family is now the “main” one, and whether the two of you are already a family in your own right.

Couples often fall into one of three traps. The first is the marathon: two lunches and a dinner in one day so that nobody is offended, after which both of you are exhausted and at odds. The second is silent dominance: you spend the holidays wherever the pressure is greater, and the one who gave in carries the resentment all year. The third is the last-minute conversation: you start talking about Christmas on 20 December, when the invitations have already been accepted and feelings are already running high.

There is no single right solution. Some couples alternate years, others split the days, others start their own tradition and invite the parents to them. All that matters is that the two of you decide — and that you decide early enough to have time to pass it on without having to apologise.

Interference: when help becomes control

Most parents who interfere do not do it out of malice. They help with housing, look after the grandchildren, lend money for a car. In Slovenia it is especially common for a young couple to build on the parents’ land or live on the top floor of the family house. That is a great help and, at the same time, a great trap: when the boundary between two households is only a staircase, the boundary between decisions blurs quickly too.

Help becomes control when it comes with a price that was never spoken. When a loan is the reason your parents have an opinion about where you go on holiday. When looking after the grandchildren means Grandma decides what the child eats and when they go to bed. When a key to the flat becomes the right to come round whenever she likes.

A particularly insidious form of interference is the one the couple invites in themselves. When you argue with your partner and ring your mother to tell her how impossible he was again, you have invited a third person into the relationship. In family therapy we call this triangulation: the tension between two people is relieved by pulling in a third. You will feel better for a moment. But your mother will remember how impossible he was long after the two of you have made up. And at the next Sunday lunch your partner will feel he is in the dock without knowing why.

How to set boundaries as a couple

A boundary with your family of origin does not start with your mother-in-law. It starts between the two of you. A few principles that tend to prove useful:

• Agree with each other first. Do not go to your parents with “she doesn’t want us to come”. That makes your partner the culprit and does not bring you closer. Say “we have decided”.
• Each of you talks to your own family. This is one of the most useful rules I know. Your parents have known you all your life and will forgive you more than they will forgive your partner. Your partner is not your messenger.
• Be specific. “We need a bit more space” means nothing. “Please ring before you come round” means something that can actually be respected.
• Separate boundaries from punishment. A boundary says what you will do, not what the other person must do. “If you comment on how we raise the children at lunch again, we will go home early” is a boundary. “Until you apologise, you won’t see your grandchild” is a punishment.
• Expect a reaction. When a system changes, it pushes back. Hurt feelings, silence or tears do not mean the boundary was wrong. They mean it was noticed.

Simple phrases can help too; you will find them in the knowledge base under sentences for setting boundaries, along with the broader post Setting boundaries, which explains why a boundary so often feels selfish even though it is a condition for a healthy relationship.

What such a conversation can sound like

Let us go back to the couple from the opening. Say they decide to stay at home for Christmas this year, and he rings his mother. The conversation might go something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“Mum, about Christmas. This year we’re staying at home. But we’ll come for lunch on Boxing Day, if that suits you.”
“At home? You’ve always come. Is this her idea?”
“We decided together. Last year we were completely worn out from driving back and forth.”
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong. I know you’re sad about it. I am a bit too. But that’s what we’ve agreed.”
Silence. “Well, Boxing Day then. I’ll bake a potica.”

He did not solve everything. His mother was hurt and may stay hurt for a few more weeks. But he did three things that count: he told her himself, without hiding his partner behind him; he did not apologise or explain endlessly; and he offered something that keeps them in contact. He heard his mother’s disappointment — but he did not change the decision because of it. That is differentiation in practice.

For his partner, the most important thing was hearing “we decided”. Not “she doesn’t want to”. That is the moment a couple becomes a system — when both of you feel you are on the same side of the table.

Exercise: a map of two families

Do this exercise together on a calm evening, not in the middle of an argument. It takes about half an hour.

1. Each of you writes down three rules of your family that nobody ever said out loud. “We don’t talk about money.” “We go to Grandma’s every Sunday.” “When Mum is hurt, everyone backs off.”
2. Read them to each other aloud, without comment. Just listen to what your partner carries with them.
3. Each of you chooses one situation in the past year when you felt there was too much of your own or your partner’s family in your relationship. Describe it with an “I” statement: “I felt pushed aside when …”
4. Agree on a single boundary you want to try out over the next month. One, not five. And agree who tells whom — each of you tells your own.
5. Check in a month later. How did it go? What was harder than you expected? What was easier?

If you want to take this further, the knowledge-base entries boundaries within a family and boundaries may also help.

When boundaries are not the answer

I want to be honest here, because the topic of boundaries can easily turn into a recipe for everything.

Closeness with your family of origin is not an illness. In many families, in Slovenia too, it is taken for granted that generations live close by, help each other and see each other often. That is not fusion, as long as both partners want it and the decisions stay yours. The measure is not how often you see each other, but whether you can say “no” without the world falling apart.

Sometimes parents need more. When an ageing parent falls ill or is left alone, it is normal for the balance to shift. Then the question is not how to protect yourselves from the family, but how to carry a new burden together as a couple without one partner burning out. There is more on this in the knowledge base under caring for an ageing parent.

Sometimes the mother-in-law is a scapegoat. It is not rare for a couple to redirect all their unease towards the parents, because it is easier to talk about how the mother-in-law interferes than about the fact that something between you is cooling. If it seems that all your arguments revolve around the parents, ask yourself whether that is really the heart of it — or just the safest topic.

Sometimes a boundary is not enough and distance is needed. When there is violence, threats, heavy drinking or systematic humiliation, we are no longer talking about boundaries but about safety. If you feel threatened, call the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence on 080 11 55 (in Slovenia), and in an emergency 112 or the police on 113 (in Slovenia). You may also find the post Adult children and their parents: can the relationship still be repaired? helpful.

And finally: if your conversations about parents always end in a row, that is often a sign that you are not arguing about the parents, but about whether you come first for each other. That is something couples therapy can help with — not so that someone wins, but so that both of you can see what pulls each of you towards your own side.

What to remember

• When a couple forms, a new system forms, with its own boundaries — not a branch office of one of the families of origin.
• Differentiation means staying close to your parents while making decisions together with your partner; fusion and cutoff are just two ways of avoiding tension.
• Loyalty to your parents is an expression of love, but unconscious loyalty can stretch a person between two allegiances.
• A rule that often helps: each of you talks to your own family, and you present the decision as a shared one.
• A boundary says what you will do; a reaction to it does not mean it was wrong.