Her husband did not publicly scold or defend his mother. He chose to remain silent. Every time she mentioned it, he just said: "Mom is just worried, don't think too much". It was that silence, according to Ms. Lan, that caused the marriage to start to crack.
Conflicts like the one of Ms. Lan and her husband are not uncommon. They usually do not start from malice, but from a change in position in the family.
When a person gets married, the priority order in life is forced to shift. Parents are still parents, but the position is no longer the same as before. Couple becomes the center of a new family. In theory, this is natural. But in reality, this shift often does not happen smoothly.
Many parents, even if they don't say it, still feel that they have lost a part of their influence on their children. The child who once shared every decision, now begins to have his own choices, sometimes no longer needing the opinion of the family. That change, if not correctly identified, is easily transformed into controlled behaviors: Contributing more opinions, intervening deeper, or putting pressure under the guise of caring.
For insiders, these expressions are often seen on the surface: A statement that hurts you, an attitude that makes you feel underestimated, or a separate decision that is interrupted. And from there, the way of reacting also easily deviates.
Some people quickly conclude that the other side's parents hate them. Some people try to reassure that it's all just accidental, due to generational differences. Two seemingly opposite understandings, but both have a common point: Ignoring the nature of the problem.
In many cases, what drives parents' behavior is not the desire to hurt their daughter-in-law or son-in-law. What stands behind is often the feeling of losing a familiar position, or not accepting that their child has stepped into a new priority order. When they cannot name that emotion, they express it through repetitive behaviors, from giving advice, scrutinizing to intervening.
The problem lies in the fact that when reading the motive incorrectly, insiders often react incorrectly to the starting point.
If considering the whole thing as malicious, the reaction is usually direct confrontation with the other parent. But the real knot may not be there, but in the fact that the partner has not stood in their right position - has not established a clear boundary between the new family and the original family.
Conversely, if you think everything is just unintentional and not worth making a big deal of it, the consequence is that important boundaries of marriage are gradually given up through each moment of silence. Small things accumulated over time will become prolonged fatigue.
They should have had a frank dialogue with their partner about the boundaries, but instead focused on proving to their parents that they were not wrong. They should have seen this as a matter of position and priority in the new family, but instead fell into arguments about right and wrong in each sentence. They should have identified a pattern of repetition, but instead handled each event as separate pieces.
Marriage cannot avoid collisions. But the deciding factor is not who hurts you, but what you understand is working behind you. Not everyone who hurts you is intentional. But just misunderstanding the motive for a while, people can handle the way they protect their marriage incorrectly.
