Family--The One You Marry Into

Today marks 32 years of a shared destiny with my spouse.  When you marry someone or otherwise join your life with theirs, you take on more than the individual.  You don’t have to, but as is oft repeated, ‘no man is an island’.  You acquire a life partner, you also get their family.

You do have some flexibility about this situation.  It is not always mandatory that you welcome all of your partner’s family with open arms.  There are some factors to consider—the first is your spouse’s relationship with their relatives and family friends.  You might luck out.  The relationship could either be so fantastic or so terrible that when you opt for a life together, you think you n know more or less what you are getting into.  Up to a point, you can decide if this is the sort of family relationship you can live with going forward.  I sometimes worry that this is a significant hindrance for my offspring and their candidates for long term relationships.  We are loud, opinionated, occasionally overbearing (maybe more than occasionally, if the truth be told…), and I suspect that may be a little overwhelming for the uninitiated.  We literally eat off each other’s plates.  If someone orders something that they don’t like, we try to find a way to trade and share so that everyone is satisfied.  It is a community model of resource allocation.  Private stockpiling of preferred commodities is not well tolerated.  Some people come from families where what you order is what you get.  Brace yourself—life at the Kline dinner table, whether at home or out, is quite another story.

So I worry that it eliminates otherwise wonderful people who find us just too lacking in personal boundaries.  But does the present reflect the future?  Would someone who shares my offspring’s life have to buy into that?  Probably it would be completely unnecessary, but it might be hard to see that when you are at the ground level.  There are several reasons that it is not required, and the most important one is that you really do not know what the future holds.

On the other hand, it is important to think about if you can deal with the family system your partner grew up in, because things like how you will deal with the inevitable disasters that will occur down the road are reflected in how you were raised.  Are you people who band together, or are you an ‘every man for himself’ sort of family? Do you help others?  Are you generous or self-protecting?  What works for you in terms of what you need?  Most importantly, do you share values?  In the end, I think that is the most important ingredient to success of a long term relationship and what you can learn from looking at your partner’s family.