Puzzled about in-law - DIL relationship

Good question Malyatha!

My point is that before marriage, a son is fulfilling the emotional needs of his mom that his Dad should have been meeting i.e. Son was standing in for his father. Now when the son gets married and has to attend to his own wife's needs, dear mom is now back at square one, with no one to fulfill her emotional needs.

She then ofcourse, blames the newcomer, aka the DIL for 'taking' her son away from her and thus begins the war between DIL and MIL.

I am in no way saying here that a son should sever his ties with his mom, what I am saying is that after he gets married, he cannot stand in for his father anymore, and thus the poor mom is back to her original place where her emotional needs were not being fulfilled.

I say this from my own experience. My FIL I feel never gave importance to his wife, and she derives all her happiness from her son and his achievements. She has 2 daughters but she openly says her son is her greatest achievement and that her daughters are nowhere near him. FIL was never emotionally close to his wife or kids, though he loves them from the bottom of his heart, he never learnt to express it. So what do I see on my visits to home - MIL, SILs, me and DH in 1 room, having a merry old time while FIL is in another room by himself.

Ofcourse, for a normal guy this kind of love would go straight to his head but thankfully, it's the the case for my DH. He's pretty level headed and has not let the love and adulation of his mom go to his head and thankfully does not expect me to worship the ground that he walks on. But ofcourse, he behaves as if no one is smarter or more logical than he is ;-), especially me!

My MIL from day 1 told me no one was more important to her son than her and how loving and obedient he was to her and how he always did what she told him to. I just nodded my head while thinking "duh if that were the case why did he marry me against your wishes". When she came to visit me, she thought my husband listened to me too much and told me that I should not have too much sex with him - this because she believed I was using sex to control him! When my kid was born, and I was feeding him in my room and my mom was keeping me company, she would be standing outside my bedroom door with her ear against the door trying to find out what my mom and I talked about. If this is not insecurity then what is? She has told me to my face, in front of my DH that I have "stolen" her son from her. What do you say to that?

I for my part, have no issues with my DH being close to his mom. My belief is mom is mom, no one can be as selfless in love as a mom, and wife is wife. and neither can take the place of the other. I am secure in my DH's love and have no problems with him spending time with her. infact, whenever she visits, I try to leave them too alone for an hour or 2 per day so that they can bond and spend time together. I don't think that just because DH is spending time with his mom, that his love for me is going to go down the drain. Yah she tends to bitch about me but so what? Just because she says something bad abt me does not make me bad! As long as I am secure in my sayings and doings, I really do not care about what she says about me.

Yes my DH also tends to be emotionally unavailable at times just like his dad but I am working on it. I want him to fulfill my emotional needs, not my son. Because I don't want to turn into my MIL 30 years down the road!

 

Dear Janice,

There is a saying in my native language which goes as.... if two hands meet then only we can clap.
So in any relation there must be give and take and some amount of tolerance.These simple things i feel will take the relations long...

suji

 

I think this is a VERY real aspect of the mil-dil battle, although it is not often discussed for obvious reasons.

Many times mil's boast that they do EVERYTHING for their sons. They believe that they alone can meet all their son's needs in life. But in their hearts they know the truth, that they can never give their sons the type of physical intimacy, love and companionship the way their dils can. It's a bitter pill to swallow for these posessive moms to realize that there are some things on this earth which only the wife can do. I think when they stew over this realization it just increases their bitterness towards the dil.

I'm not saying any mother would even wish to be involved with her son in a romantic way... I'm just saying that the son's desire for a wife irritates certain mothers.

pmahensa, my mil also made comments to my dh about our bedroom life very early in the relationship. but my dh stopped that conversation in its tracks. some topics are just not appropriate for a parent to talk about with their son or dil. sex is one of them. eww.

 

Hi Pooja,

Thanks for responding! This topic would provide a lot of beef for a social psychology class!

First of all, I would like to address the assumption that a person cannot be equally available to two people (wife AND mother), without short-changing either of them. This may or may not be true, depending upon the individual in question.

Secondly, as a Society, do we have different expectations from, and different reactions to the same actions performed by, men and women? For example, do we, as a culture, believe that a son's job is to provide financial support to his parents while it is a daughter's job to provide the emotional support? Is that why we have strong reactions when individuals deviate from these unspoken social norms?

There must be many, many, many, many mothers out there with absentee husbands, no sons, and only daughters. And, quite possibly, these daughters have been standing in for their fathers as their mothers' emotional and moral props since birth, continuing to do so even after marriage. However, we rarely hear the husbands of these daughters complaining of the 'unnatural closeness' of their wives & PILs or label their wives 'Mama's girl' or 'Daddy's Princess'! In fact, in these very forums, we have had posts that openly say that daughters are actually 'better' than sons because 'at least daughters will provide emotional support to their parents in their old age'.

I am interested in understanding why this view - that a daughter may freely provide unlimited emotional support to her parents while a son may not, once he marries - seems to be so universally held and accepted. I say 'universally' because there is even an Irish proverb that observes that 'a son is a son till he gets him a wife; a daughter is a daughter all of her life!'

I am positive that this topic may already have been researched and that there must be published studies on this issue, but it is also quite interesting to discuss them amongst ourselves as laypersons, daughters & DILs, rather than as clinicians probing a possible pathology!

 

Good thoughts and questions Malyatha. I am no social scientist and base my thoughts and opinions just on what I see and experience. And it is good to bounce ideas off of each other .. very eye opening for me!

I make the assumption that a person(male) cannot be equally available to two people (wife AND mother), without short-changing either of them because I feel that women are better multi-taskers and most men are not! Women can handle house, husband, kids and a job. They are nurturers by nature. Men can't do this multi-tasking as efficiently as women, especially when caught between 2 women!

I agree with you that a lot depends on the individual, and I know a few men(my DH included) who I think manage their relations well, but in 95% of the cases, I don't think this is true.

There is nothing wrong in a man being there for his parents. It's just that in most cases, while the woman can manage all her relations/duties with equal aplomb, while most men (and I am generalizing here) cannot. If he pays attention to his wife, mom throws a hissy fit and vice-versa. and in most cases, men don't know how to handle this well.

>>I am interested in understanding why this view - that a daughter may freely provide unlimited emotional support to her parents while a son may not, once he marries - seems to be so universally held and accepted. I say 'universally' because there is even an Irish proverb that observes that 'a son is a son till he gets him a wife; a daughter is a daughter all of her life!'

societal norms teach us "pati parmeshwar" and "hubby's family is your family" etc etc. So it is expected that a woman should priortize her husband and his family over her own. I have not seen cases where a wife gets the cold shoulder from her parents if she pays attention to her spouse or his family. So why does the guy's mother behave this way? Why the insecurity? what if the guy loves his wife ... how does that decrease his love for his mom? how can you compare the 2?

again I'd like to reiterate my point about the efficiency of women as multi-taskers. women can take the liberty of being there for their parents because they can balance it with other aspects of their lives. they balance parental love, spousal love, love for the kids, duties towards IL's and a job. how many men have you seen do that successfully? and I must admit I am generalizing a lot here, so do bear with me!

I believe we are part of the sandwich generation, i.e. we are caught between the old world and the new. as educated sane thinkers, we need to ensure that we break this vicious cycle of insecurity that causes women to become each other's worst enemy. why can we not all understand that mom is mom and wife is wife and each has her own importance. and just because the guy loves his mom does not mean he hates his wife and vice-versa!

 

Hi Pooja,

I went about accessing my University's database to dig up studies that discuss the issue of gender differences in multitasking, and gender roles in supporting aging / disabled parents.

I could not find any studies that specifically supported the existence of gender differences in multitasking. I am talking about studies that were published in respected, peer-reviewed journals, although the Internet abounds with anecdotal evidence claiming the supremacy of one gender over the other when it comes to tackling two or more tasks simultaneously. Obviously, the database would not contain details of any research-in-progress. In addition, I came across quite a few studies by teams at the Universities of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford that indicated that multitasking can actually come at high cost to an individual's cognitive resources, and decrease efficiency / productivity, regardless of that individual's gender.

As one researcher put it, "doing it all can sometimes get nothing done!" If you are interested, then you could peruse this release by the American Psychological Association that states that multitasking actually takes a lot of time and may actually be less efficient than single task processing.

Is Multitasking More Efficient?

BTW, female brains (not necessarily female individuals but individuals whose brains are 'feminine') do have larger corpus collossum that may permit them to process multiple activities at the same time (such as talking on the cell phone and driving at the same) than do male brains, but this multitasking, as studies point out, does not necessarily produce desirable outputs or increase productivity (hence, perhaps, the ban on cell phone talking whilst driving?).

I think that it is just popular opinion, rather than scientific research, that holds that women are better multitaskers than men. For example, until a generation ago, at least, women typically tended to be housewives who did multiple things during the course of the day - such as cooking / cleaning / raising kids / managing social calendars etc, whereas men went off to work and focused only on getting their job for the day done during the typical work-hours. This led to the common belief that women could do so much more than men could, and hence, that men were incapable of multi-tasking than were women. However, given that research indicates that multi-tasking can have an adverse impact on the efficiency of the performer, decrease productivity, and dilute output, this means that a woman who multitasks may actually be doing a less-than-perfect job than her husband who tackles and finishes one task at a time.

And therein lies the tragedy. This is not so much about a man's ability or inability to multitask as much as it is about both women demanding 100% of the son's / husband's attention, and being intolerant of even a little of love and attention being diverted away from one to the other.

I think this goes back to the previous view you expressed.

This view that men can somehow *not* be there for BOTH their parents and their wives, and hence wives' beliefs that they are being short-changed by their husbands availability to their parents, leads the wives to fight this support - sometimes tooth-and-nail. MILs pick up on the DILs' resentment and attempts to curb their husbands' (MILs' sons') availability to the MILs and become more and more insecure that the sons, listening to their wives, will cease to be available for them. Like the wives, the mothers also believe that the sons' support is a limited resource and they set out to stake their claim to this, believing that if they don't 'fight' for what is 'theirs', that they will then be left high-and-dry. The more the mothers attempt to interject themselves into their sons' lives, the more the DILs fight back, and, pretty soon, it is an all-out and very ugly war with neither women wanting to give in or give up. The son / husband watches on in bewilderment as both women go berserk and he is caught between a rock and a hard place. The only solution, under this circumstance, is for BOTH women to take a step back, pick their battles, and indulge in a little give-and-take (even if very grudgingly). A mother will always be a mother, a wife will always be a wife. Neither will vanish from the scene, so it behooves BOTH women to work together for the peace of mind of the man that they BOTH love and are fighting over.

There have been cases where a son has cut off his mother to satisfy his wife, but it is rarely an easy break. The husband holds a grudge against his wife for forcing him to cut off or limit interactions with his mother and retaliates by either distancing himself - emotionally - from his wife, or by controlling / limiting his wife's interactions with HER parents or by becoming very abusive to the wife. In cases where the son chooses his mother over his wife, too, he does so with great difficulty and is resentful of his mother for forcing him to make a choice that, for all intents & purposes, ruins his marriage, destroys his family's harmony and forces his children to grow up in an unhappy home. In this case, too, he lashes out at his mother for causing the rift with his wife, distances himself from her, and refuses to play the part of the doting son that he may have been before.

Therefore, IMO, in the battle of mother vs wife, neither wins. Certainly not the son / husband who stands to lose the most as the two important people in his life go hammer-tongs for each other's throats. So, it would be best if BOTH would indulge in some give-and-take to guarantee the peace and happiness of every member of the family.

 

exactly my point malyatha. both women need to back of. but i think the people of our MIL's generations that may not be an easy thing since they are conditioned that way. so what we should do if ensure that we behave in a better and more sane way when we become MIL's and spare our sons and daughters from having to choose between spouse and parents.

 

Excellent way of putting it down Malyatha... very impressive thought. Now as per the conclusion that we came up that both mother and wife should back off the battle field could you throw some light on instances wherein a wife always backs off and the mother always wins?

How will the wife feel when the precedence is always the mother? As we cannot change the MIL, we should change ourselves, agreed.. so does that mean that if a wife backs off from the scene.. then she should eventually vanish completely from her husband's life. I have noticed quite a few incidents wherein for the sake of a happy family the wife backed off but the mother makes it a point that she rules her son's life for each and everything such as where he should be going, what he should be doing, what he should wear,what he should eat,finances, when to have kids.. etc...