Daughters and Sons In Law

I'm encouraged by the fact that I've found both my daughter's first and only boyfriend and my son's first and only girlfriend to be lovely, mature, kind, and interesting people. I'm impressed with the people they've chosen to spend time with so far - so I think the odds are good that I'll like who they eventually choose to marry. They both seem to like caring and thoughtful people.

I think I would find it very difficult if I didn't like their partners. I don't know what I'd do if that were ever the case. If it was just a question of taste, I'd try to keep my mouth shut and be civil as I could. If it were ever to be something like abuse -that'd become a different scenario.

You are lucky. So am I. I really like the guy my daughter is going to marry this year.

I wish he were a bit more focused on a career, but he's not a bum by any means. I'm an over-achiever and professional excellence and success has been an important part of my life and so I have a bias towards people with a similar drive. However, future son-in-law (FSIL) sees life a little differently, which is fine as long as my daughter doesn't eventually come around to expecting Dad's focus from her husband.

She says she won't but how many brides to be are going to find any flaw in the guy they love, two months before they are wed?

Not that he is flawed, but if she changes her focus latter on to one which she experienced for 24 years, she might feel disappointed.

They want to be with each other every minute of every day which tells me they are off to a good start. That sort of passion is not sustainable, but if you don't start off with it, I think you're in trouble.

He loves her, he treats her grandly, and he's very funny. The only thing missing is that he's a bit of a liberal (parents are unreformed hippies), but my daughter and I are working on that.

I'm also lucky because my boys broke up with the women who they might have gotten serious with, but who my wife and I couldn't stand.

We're very close to our kids and so I don't know what we'll do if we detest one of their spouses.

I love my in-laws and my parents have either been out of the picture or dead for most of my marriage and so I don't have any other model to follow.

Having a liberal SIL is just what the doctor ordered, Finn. You'll be great for each other so long as we aren't talking Archie Bunker and Meathead here.

Congrats to your daughter (and to you). May they share a long, happy life together.

I fell in love with my daughter-in-law the minute I met her. She has a very warm, open demeanor. She's a keeper. That said, I don't always agree with my son and dil's views. I mostly bit my tongue.

That made me laugh because I've always admired and loved my father probably a little overtly and a lot of my sentences would start with, 'Well, my father would have...' or 'my father would never have....' to the point that even though my husband loved and respected my father as a man he got tired of being held up to his example, so I learned just not to bring my father into it.

But my parents have always treated their childrens' spouses like their own children and as a result - the love is reciprocated.
I didn't have a father-in-law, but my mother-in-law was always very loving and kind to me and again, as a result, until she died, she was one of my favorite people.


I feel exactly the same.

Interesting.

I will natter at you by saying the only people I wanted to be with every hour of every day turned out to be infatuation burnouts, and that people who have lasted in my life could make it to shops, library, and so on, by themselves - that is, were comfortable alone in space for some length of time. I know good marriages get past that infatuation deflation phase. I wish people would get past it before the marriage.

We didn't have children, so I don't have the mother in law experience, except as a daughter in law. With my niece, whom I had some role in raising, now clearly an adult but still, erm, impulsive, which some experts say people under twenty five are (don't ask, I don't know the details). I could go for the throat of her present guy, but she and I have talked about implications of this and that and the other thing. We'll see. (I have various fears that she feels destined to follow a certain route.. time for me to call her.)

On mothers in law and fathers in law: Both of mine rejected me forthwith. I was not only an apostate catholic, but older than their son. We had a good wedding without them. I always liked the father, a man of small years of education (4th grade?) but a reader and a superb story teller. Shy, but interesting once comfortable. Interested in and fairly understanding of human behavior, the perfect present for him being a book on history.

Husband's mother, a piece of work. College grad in a day most women didn't do that. How to put this - not classically pretty. She had many suitors in the war years, and when we dealt with the parents' place, we found many many golden compacts. I don't know what that signifies, exactly. I know she flirted with being daring, but I don't assume past that. She was, in my experience, martially religious, rather like my own mother in assertions. Married the husband after the war. Her sons sympathized with the father and so did I, but I had underlying sympathy for her at the same time I was aggravated.

When she was dying in the hospital and the md came in for the talk with the family, I was the only one to speak up that she had liked the flowers of the day before, as in, no, she was not entirely out of it. The family voted for desist the anti low blood pressure meds. (I didn't vote, not my place.) Well, she recovered anyway. Not much, and she died naturally.

Quoting myself -
I always liked the father, a man of small years of education (4th grade?) but a reader and a superb story teller. Shy, but interesting once comfortable. Interested in and understanding of human behavior, the perfect present for him being a book on history.

I learned from my husband's father. That last bit sounded to me condescending and that's not what I meant.

My father-in-law holds political views pretty close to yours, in general, and we get along very well. We poke each other in a good-natured way about political matters, but it's never really escalated. We're both very aware that we're probably not going to change each others' minds, and we respect each other as people.

One difference though is that my husband (his son) and I have very similar political views.

If my daughter ended up with someone I couldn't stand, whew, that'd be rough.