A son- or daughter-in-law in the family business: half in, half out

“You know you’re one of us. But we’ll talk about this among ourselves.”

Her mother-in-law said it kindly, almost tenderly, and then turned to her son. The conversation about who would run production next year carried on without her. And she sat at the same Sunday lunch she had sat at every Sunday for the past eight years, in the same company where she works every day, and for the first time felt very clearly where the line ran. She was “one of us”. But not quite.

A son-in-law or daughter-in-law in a family business lives in a particular position that is rarely talked about. They are not a successor by blood, yet they often work just as hard as the successor. They are not a “stranger”, yet at important decisions they are sometimes treated as one. They are the partner of someone who is at the same time a son or daughter, a colleague, sometimes a boss — and who has a loyalty to their parents that is older than the marriage. In this post I want to write about what happens in such a position, why it is so demanding, and how a couple can remain a couple within it.

Half in, half out

Anyone who marries into another family goes through some form of being accepted. You learn its holidays, its jokes, its unwritten rules and the topics nobody talks about. That is part of every relationship. But when the family owns a business, this process doubles. You are not only entering a family, but also an organisation — with its hierarchy, its history and its money.

And here a particular duality arises. At work you may be a head of department, a respected expert, someone who brought in new knowledge. At lunch, though, you are still “the one who married in”. You can be both at once: important and unimportant, inside and outside. People in this position often say they never know for sure which role applies at a given moment — and that the rules change precisely when it matters most.

This uncertainty is exhausting. Not because anyone is malicious, but because the line isn’t written down anywhere. The family itself often doesn’t know where it draws it. It only knows that it does, and shows it in the moments that concern ownership, succession or family secrets.

Two families, one couple, one company

In systemic family therapy we look at the family as a whole in which every part affects all the others. When someone marries, two systems meet: two families of origin, each with its own habits, expectations and wounds. Between them, the couple has to create a third system of its own. I wrote more about how a change in one member carries over to the whole family in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

In a family business a fourth circle squeezes into this space: the company itself. It has its own needs, which don’t necessarily match those of the couple or the family. The company needs decisions, speed and clear responsibilities. The family needs belonging and fairness. The couple needs time, privacy and a sense that each comes first for the other.

This complexity also shows up in research on in-law relationships in general. The social psychologist Terri Orbuch of the University of Michigan followed 373 married couples, wed in the mid-1980s, over many years. She found that the relationship with a partner’s parents doesn’t work the same way for men and women: when a husband reported a close relationship with his wife’s parents, the risk of divorce was lower, but when a wife reported a very close relationship with her husband’s parents, the risk was higher. One explanation is that women more often experience closeness also as interference in their role — which in a family business, where mother-in-law and daughter-in-law meet not only on holidays but also in the office, is all the more sensitive.

Belonging: when are you “one of us”?

The need to belong is one of the most basic human needs. You will find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under belonging. A son- or daughter-in-law in a family business often feels that belonging is conditional: as long as you act in line with the family, you are “one of us”; when you disagree with something, you become “from elsewhere” again.

This conditionality is rarely said out loud. It shows in small things: who is invited to the meeting where the future is decided; who hears important news first; who may criticise the father-in-law and who may not. It also shows in language — in the difference between “we” and “you”, which everyone uses without thinking about it.

When someone lives with conditional belonging for a long time, they can respond in two ways. They may start to over-adapt — becoming more loyal to the company than the successor, to earn their place. Or they may withdraw and begin to live emotionally outside the family, even while physically remaining in it. Both are understandable, both wear a person down in the long run — and both carry over into the couple’s relationship.

A loyalty that splits

The hardest part of the position is often not the relationship between the in-law and the parents-in-law. The hardest part is the partner in the middle. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy described how everyone carries a loyalty to their family of origin — a deep, often invisible obligation that is older than any choice. When we marry, this loyalty doesn’t disappear. It simply gains a rival.

In a family business this split is especially sharp. The successor is a son or daughter and a partner at the same time. When a dispute arises between his father and his wife, he has to choose — or at least that is how it feels. Many choose silence: they take neither side, which the partner usually experiences as a choice against them.

This is often where what systemic therapy calls triangulation appears: tension between two people is not resolved between them, but through a third. The mother-in-law doesn’t talk directly to her daughter-in-law, but complains to her son. The daughter-in-law doesn’t talk directly to her mother-in-law, but tells her husband at home what his mother has said this time. The son becomes messenger, interpreter and buffer — and in this role slowly loses touch with both. For more on how a similar pattern shows up between adult children and their parents, read Emotional baggage from your family of origin: what we carry into our relationships.

The couple against the family of origin — or with it?

In structural family therapy, Salvador Minuchin stressed that every subsystem in a family needs a clear boundary. The couple must have a space that the parents don’t enter; the parents must have their own space that the children don’t enter. A boundary isn’t a wall. It is a membrane that lets contact through but keeps its shape.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, Christian Gostečnik describes how each partner unconsciously brings into the relationship the emotional atmosphere of their family of origin — and how a couple can learn to recognise it instead of repeating it. In a family business this boundary is very hard to set, because the couple and the parents meet every day, at work and at home. Decisions about work become decisions about the family and vice versa. So the couple often faces a false choice: either “fight” the family of origin or submit to it. Murray Bowen showed that there is a third way — differentiation: staying connected to the family while knowing clearly where you stand yourself and where you stand as a couple.

It isn’t about the successor having to “choose his wife over his parents”. It is about the couple being guided neither by fear of the parents nor by rebellion against them, but by an agreement between the two partners. For more on why setting boundaries so often feels selfish, read Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it, and see the knowledge base under boundaries.

What a son- or daughter-in-law brings

So far I have written mostly about difficulties. But it is important to see the other side too. A son- or daughter-in-law often brings into the family system something the family lacks: an outside view. They see patterns that are invisible to others because the others grew up inside them. They ask “why do we do it this way?” when everyone else only knows “it has always been done like this”.

The family business researchers Ernesto Poza and Tracey Messer described how the spouses of owners and successors play an important, often overlooked role in whether a company survives the transition between generations. They tend relationships, build trust between family members and sometimes soften conflicts the family couldn’t manage alone. This role is rarely official and even more rarely acknowledged.

When a family can accept this, a son- or daughter-in-law can be a source of freshness and balance. When it can’t, the outside view is experienced as an attack, and the person who brings it as an intruder. The difference often lies in how willing the family itself is to see its own patterns.

A conversation in the evening

This is how a conversation between a couple might sound after a tiring day at the company (composite, not a real person):

“Your father corrected me in front of everyone again.”
“You know what he’s like. He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I’m not asking what he meant. I’m asking where you were.”
“What was I supposed to do? Have a row with him in the middle of the meeting?”
“No. But tell me you saw it. That I’m not on my own.”
“… I saw it. And I didn’t like it.”
“That. That’s all I needed to hear.”

The conversation shows a common misunderstanding: the successor thinks his partner expects him to fight his father, while what the partner actually expects first is to be seen. Once this is cleared up, the tension usually eases — not because the dispute with the father-in-law has been resolved, but because the couple is standing together again.

An exercise for the couple: our agreement

Do the exercise together, on a calm evening, not straight after an argument. You will need about half an hour.

1. Each of you writes down three situations in the past year when you felt alone in relation to your partner’s family, or your own, in the business. Just the facts: who, what, where.
2. Read your situations to each other. The one listening defends neither their family nor themselves. They simply sum up what they heard: “If I understand you correctly, you felt … then.”
3. For each situation, find what you would have wanted from each other — not from the parents-in-law. It is often something small: a look, a sentence, a conversation later at home.
4. Agree on one rule you will keep from now on. For example: “We talk about disagreements with your parents between the two of us before you talk about them with them.” Or: “We don’t talk about work at Sunday lunch.”
5. Check in a month’s time how the rule is working. Not as judges, but as two people building something together. If it isn’t working, change it.

The exercise won’t change the family. But it does change something you both have influence over: that you stand before the family as a couple, not as two individuals with different loyalties.

Where this view falls short

Not everything is dynamics. Sometimes there are very concrete injustices: pay that doesn’t compare with the successor’s, a share the son- or daughter-in-law will never have, or contracts that don’t protect their work. These are questions for a lawyer, an accountant or a family business adviser — therapy can help you talk about them more easily, but it can’t replace them.

Not everything is the family. Sometimes the dispute with the mother-in-law is only the most visible symptom of a problem the couple has on its own: unspoken resentments, different expectations or a distance that built up elsewhere. If difficulties appear outside the business too, it is worth looking at the relationship itself, not only its context.

Sometimes the right decision is to leave. Nothing says a son- or daughter-in-law must stay in the business at any cost. For some couples, one partner leaving the company was exactly what saved the relationship — because the line between family and work then drew itself. That isn’t defeat. It can be a mature decision that gives the couple room.

When there is violence or threats — psychological, economic or physical — this is not “trouble with the father-in-law”. Then safety comes first: in Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is 080 11 55; in an emergency call 112, or the police on 113.

When to seek help

It makes sense to seek help when you notice that your conversations keep ending in the same dispute about his or her parents; when one of you feels there is no longer room for them in the relationship; when you both dread Sunday lunch; or when decisions about the company start spilling too directly into your home.

Couples therapy, in which we look at your relationship, can help here, as can family therapy, in which the wider family takes part. When you want to understand where the patterns each of you brings from your own family come from, a genogram is valuable — a drawing of the family across several generations. This is the purpose of the longer session A Look into the Past. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana. If you are interested in how to separate roles when your partner’s father is also the boss, read Father as boss: how to separate family from business, and on sibling rivalry, Siblings and succession: a rivalry that moves into the boardroom.

The daughter-in-law at Sunday lunch couldn’t change how her mother-in-law saw her. But that evening at home she could tell her husband what she had felt. And he could say that he had seen it. From small moments like these, a couple slowly builds itself into a system of its own — not against the family, but alongside it.

What to remember

• A son- or daughter-in-law in a family business lives half in, half out — belonging is often conditional and rarely spoken.
• The hardest position often belongs to the partner in the middle, pulled by loyalty to their parents and to their partner at once.
• The couple isn’t “against” the family of origin, but needs its own boundary — a membrane that lets contact through and keeps its shape.
• A son- or daughter-in-law also brings an outside view, which can be valuable to a family business.
• Questions of ownership and contracts belong with legal and business professionals; therapy helps with the relationships woven around them.