Holidays With Your In-laws Don’t Have to Be Awful

My relationship with my in-laws was forged in a cloud of sawdust. It was years ago, after my wife and I bought a small fixer upper in Los Angeles. My mother- and father-in-law had driven up from San Diego to help us remodel our second bedroom, and before long, my father-in-law was sanding 100 years of paint off the old craftsman door trim. It took hours in a hot room, thick with paint dust. But eventually, he exposed the century-old wood. 

Somehow, I won the game of in-law roulette. I married into a family that shows up for home improvement projects, and with whom I have an amazing relationship. But the more time that passes, the more I’m convinced that the quality of that relationship isn’t just the result of chance. In fact, I’ve seen firsthand that despite their poor reputation, in-law relationships can be deeply rewarding. 

That may sound crazy, especially at this time of year when many people are bracing for awkward holiday dinners with distant in-laws. But especially for those in the earlier stages of their relationships, there is still time. Whether in-laws are a source of suffering or a source of joy is, in the end, a choice. 

Strained in-law relationships are a ubiquitous cultural trope, mined for comedic effect—think Meet the Parents or Monster-in-law—or, in the case of films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, for social commentary. Classics of the literary canon—everything from Pride and Prejudice to Things Fall Apart—similarly plumb the friction associated with extended family.

Expert Tips For Better In-Law Relationships

But the topic hasn’t just caught the eye of artists. Experts have also spent years exploring what makes in-law relationships work, or not, and it’s here that we begin finding useful guidance. Researchers have repeatedly found, for example, that feelings of closeness to in-laws impact marital quality, and that a shared perception of closeness is predictive of a marriage’s stability. 

Another study, published in 2013, found that in-law ties were stronger when people spent time with their future mothers-in-law before getting married, and went into the marriage with positive expectations. In a similar vein, researchers in 2019 came to similar conclusions, adding that mothers- and daughters-in-law had closer relationships if the mothers and sons were also close.

What jumps out about these findings is that nothing here is rocket science. Though movies treat in-law friction as an inevitable downside of marriage, researchers have found that simple behaviors like communication, avoiding criticism, and—perhaps most significantly—spending time together make a major difference. 

Though movies treat in-law friction as an inevitable downside of marriage, researchers have found that simple behaviors like communication, avoiding criticism, and—perhaps most significantly—spending time together make a major difference. 

That isn’t surprising, with experts such as Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar long pointing to time spent together as a key ingredient for strong relationships. The point is that these are all behaviors anyone can control. In other words, want to avoid an awkward Christmas dinner with your extended family members who have all the wrong opinions? Well, then don’t just see them for that dinner. Start building relationships with them beyond the holidays. 

Build Relationships Beyond the Holidays

An introvert by nature, this type of thing has not always come naturally to me. But I was fortunate enough to see it happen firsthand in the early days of dating my now wife. Two months before we got married, I traveled overseas to work on a documentary. While I was out of the country, my then-fiancé visited my parents multiple times. She and my stepmother went shopping together. She attended family reunions. When I returned from my trip, I was surprised to discover that she was friends with everyone in my family. 

She continued doing this in the early years of our marriage as well, once traveling with several of my family members—but not me—to visit my ailing grandmother. When we were transitioning to a new city for a job, she lived with my parents for two months while I set up our new household. 

Today, my wife functions as a core leader for both our extended families. I sometimes joke that she has a stronger relationship with my siblings and parents than I do—but it’s not really a joke. My family turns to her for advice, for friendship, and for the latest family news. 

My wife is remarkable in many ways, but these behaviors are not out of reach for most families—especially younger couples who are still getting to know their future or new in-laws. It just boils down to putting into practice what researchers have found about functional in-law relationships. Holiday dinners are not a chore for my wife—and multitudes of people like her—because, at a critical time in her youth, she invested in relationships. 

When this works, it works really well, with a 2009 study capturing the pleasure that comes from having great in-laws.

Although there are undoubtedly in-law relationships that are just as tumultuous and problematic as many of our popular perceptions, in-law relationships can be extremely beneficial and may even be as satisfying as the family-of-origin relationship. 

That study jumped out to me in particular because it also points to something else that benefits in-law relationships: Behaviors that are “likely to engender a sense of a familial identity.” 

Forge a Family Identity

When I saw "familial identity,” I immediately thought of another idea I’ve sometimes referred to as the “soul-mate paradigm” and which I’ve written about in the past in the context of romantic relationships. The gist is that before the modern period, married couples often thought of themselves first and foremost as partners in a shared enterprise, like a family farm. Love and affection mattered, obviously, but the idea is that “work-mate” relationships are potentially stronger than those based solely on emotion—which ebbs and flows over time. A marriage, in other words, is less likely to fail if the couple sees themselves as both in love and working on some grander project.

Families that work together for some common cause—who seem themselves as 'work mates'—have something more than mere feelings as a foundation for their relationships. 

But the idea of a “familial identity” hints that this idea works beyond just nuclear units. Families that work together for some common cause—who seem themselves as “work mates”—have something more than mere feelings acting as a foundation for their relationships. 

This is, of course, how families have historically functioned. On a family farm, parents might’ve worked with their children, who would later grow up, marry, and bring in-laws into the group. Surely there was plenty of friction even in the pre-modern era, but linked livelihoods also create an incentive to make peace. And even today, enterprising families—a few years ago I profiled one such family that operates a large real estate brokerage—still function this way. These groups are sometimes called “corporate families” because they run businesses, but also because the word “corporation” comes from a latin root, corpus, meaning “body.” Which is to say, work-mate families strive together as a single body. 

Avoid Stressful Holidays With the In-Laws 

So, what does this have to do with improving in-law relationships over the holidays? 

The workmate, corporate family paradigm offers a deeper way to think about in-law relationships. It’s hard to sit through another political rant when all we’re doing is gritting our teeth and bearing one another’s company. If all that binds us is affection or a spouse, and we end up with no affection, there’s nothing really binding us at all. But the holidays are a different experience entirely when we share the same familial identity, when we see ourselves as part of the same family “corpus.”

Most of us won’t go on to start family farms. But as I think about the reasons I lucked out with incredible in-laws, I keep coming back to that day sanding the wood trim. Or about the time my father-in-law gave me his circular saw so I could build baseboards. Or the time we constructed a kitchen wall—a wall that we still often note is indestructible. 

So maybe it’s more than just luck. Maybe the key is time and work and the sense that we’ve become partners in building a family. It started with my wife, who, in her twenties, crisscrossed several states again and again just to be with my family. And maybe that’s the key for all of us who want a better “meet the parents” moment: Holidays with the in-laws can be a burden, or they can be a source of joy. It’s our choice. 

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock