Can I ask you a personal question?

🙍‍♀️ A tale as old as time

If there’s one relationship trope that never ceases to supply stories that are equal parts entertaining and horrifying, it’s that of the daughter-in-law / mother-in-law relationship. The millennials among us will recall movies like Monster-In-Law as pillars in our early romcom education, while newer hit shows like The White Lotus (pictured above) have showcased relationships comically fraught with parental interference without coming across as one bit stale or overdone. And if you poll a modern female friend group, you’d probably have a better chance coming across someone dealing with a textbook mama’s boy on their hands than you would flipping heads on a coin toss.

But the trope didn’t originate in the past century (or maybe even in the past millennium). In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud, neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, famously studied a particular brand of “mommy issues” he more professionally referred to as the Oedipus complex. This theory postulates that male children feel as though they are competing with their father for their mother's affection and attention, even sexually (...which, if you ask us, is objectively kind of crazy, but hey, we’re not neurologists). And there’s even evidence that MIL jokes date back to Roman times.

If the MIL trope has survived a couple thousand years, there must at least be some truth to it. One 2021 survey found that only about half of daughters-in-law reported being satisfied or very satisfied with their relationship with their mother-in-law (though somewhat amusingly, roughly three quarters of mothers-in-law said they were satisfied). Other studies have shown that women report having more conflict with their MILs than their own mothers, while mothers report having more conflict with the DILs than their own daughters. And more surveys have revealed that women experience considerably more stress due to in-law relationships than their husbands.

Of course, it is not particularly surprising that we may, on average, find ourselves disagreeing more frequently with the opinions of our partner’s family than those of our own. As professor and social science researcher Gretchen Perry, who has written extensively on the topic of in-law relationships, shared with the BBC, “it’s more likely you’re going to agree and have common interests with [your own family]”, while there might be “less of an overlap in common agreement” with in-laws. But this doesn’t exactly explain why relationships between women and their partners’ moms prove to be more challenging than the rest, so what else is going on there?

🙅‍♀️ Woman v. woman, a classic

Digging one level deeper into the data starts to paint a clearer picture. In a 2018 study out of Finland, researchers discovered that one specific factor was a key indicator of how much conflict partners would report experiencing with their in-laws: whether or not they had children. Further, “daughters-in-law were more likely to report conflicts when paternal grandmothers provided more grandchild care.” Another 2016 survey conducted by Fatherly sought to determine the most common sources of arguments between partners and their in-laws. The results? While men reported slightly higher rates of arguments surrounding the topic of “career success” and were roughly as likely as women to attribute arguments to “money,” women were significantly more likely to cite “parenting style” as the core source of conflict, though both men and women rated it highest.

American women, on average, assume a dramatically larger share of childcare responsibilities than men. Data from the Census Bureau reveals that fathers accounted for only 5% of stay-at-home caregivers in 2022. According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, among grandparents serving as the primary caregiver for a grandchild, nearly two thirds were women. The federal government’s American Time Use Survey from 2023 found that “on an average day, among adults living in households with children under age 6, women spent 1.2 hours providing physical care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children; by contrast, men spent 34 minutes providing physical care.” In other words, women spent roughly double the time providing childcare. This time gap, of course, only widens over weeks, months, and years.

Given both the gendered distribution of childcare responsibilities and the predominant role of parenting style in tensions between couples and their in-laws, it is perhaps no wonder that women – both daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law – find themselves dealing with the brunt of the stress. While the younger of the two faces immense pressure to successfully raise children (and possibly juggle a career at the same time), the elder has experienced the challenges of doing so firsthand and likely not only has strong opinions based on these experiences, but also ties such opinions to their personal identity in some way. In the vast majority of these cases, both parties want what’s best for their families. And yet, they are often getting lost in translation.

🤷‍♀️ Overbearing parenting?

Another interesting and potentially relevant trend of the last few decades is what we colloquially refer to as “helicopter parenting.” More than ever, parents are heavily involved with all aspects of their children’s lives, even their adult children’s lives, often assisting wherever possible with school, work, and interpersonal relationships. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, about a third of all Americans aged 18 to 34 say they “rely heavily on their parents for emotional support.” Roughly a quarter of all young adults surveyed see their parents in person at least once a day or a few times a week, while well over half text with their parents at the same frequency. Over the last several decades, the share of young Americans aged 18 to 29 living with their parents has steadily climbed to around 50%.

Some argue that this increased dependence of young adults on their parents is in fact over-dependence. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business argues that parents overprotect their children, engaging in parental “safetyism” in the real world while also giving them free reign in the digital world. For boys in particular, Haidt warns that this combination makes the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood especially challenging and leaves them at a higher risk of the dreaded “failure to launch.” Interestingly, a BYU study on the factors related to parental approval of adult children’s relationships found that increased interdependence between adult children and their parents may make the parents more likely to disapprove of any romantic relationships of the child.

Unfortunately, modern research on the subject of in-law relationships and parental approval of partners is still somewhat limited, so it’s hard to say with certainty how all of these factors relating to a young adult’s relationship with their parents – and their partner’s relationship with their parents – interact with each other. Still, if you’re asking us, parents that are more involved than ever are probably also more likely than ever to think they know what’s best for their adult children and less likely than ever to keep those thoughts to themselves. We’d go out on a limb and say we wouldn’t be shocked to learn that a rise in overbearing parenting also happened to drive an increase in the country’s mama’s boy population….specifically the kind of mama’s boy who always calls up his mom to get a second opinion on your opinion…without fail…just to be sure 😉.

Let us know what you think by voting in our poll and leaving an anonymous comment.

💭 Our two cents

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a good laugh out of an entertaining MIL/bf’s mom story as much as the next person (...assuming it didn’t involve my own personal, emotional, and romantic wellbeing). But as I was writing this week’s NTP something struck me about the topic that had never really crossed my mind before: this (often sensationalized) trope of women in constant conflict with their partners’ moms is yet another example of women being pitted against each other. We see it with women in the media, with women in the workplace, with women trying to balance motherhood and careers, with women fighting over men…the list goes on.

Of course, in the case of MILs, the trope didn’t just appear out of thin air; as we saw above, there are a number of factors that legitimately make these relationships particularly challenging. But these relationships are also challenging because they’re so closely intertwined with aspects of modern life in which women already face so much scrutiny. Because of the generation gap between ourselves and our partners’ moms, it can be easy to forget that they, too, have felt the pressure to be the perfect mother, the perfect partner, and the perfect professional in a world where all of those things are expected and yet simultaneously also in conflict. And our partners’ moms have made (hard) decisions relating to these parts of life that have shaped who they are, so it’s only natural that they might have conviction in those being the right decisions for us to make, too. This is certainly not to say that we should be quick to appease all of their expectations for us and agree with all of their opinions, but perhaps sometimes, their perspective may deserve a bit more grace than it’s given.

The other piece of irony about MIL relationships is that we can get so wrapped up in the conflict that we forget the person who brought us together in the first place: our partner. More often than not, the challenges we might deal with relating to our partners’ parents are probably directly related to our partners’ ability – or lack thereof – to set and communicate appropriate boundaries with their family. So it shouldn’t fall completely on us to make things work; our partners should also be doing their part to make sure we feel as loved and supported as possible, especially around their family.

🎧 Get your podcasts here

If you’re addicted to podcasts (like us) and want to hear some mostly-funny-and-hopefully-not-too-relatable tales of modern women struggling to bond with their partner’s mom, check out these episodes:

📱 U Up?: Should It Matter That My BF’s Mom Dislikes Me?

📢 Oversharing: My Mother-in-Law Won’t Respect My Boundaries | Help! My Mother-In-Law Facetuned My Engagement Photo! | Are My In-Laws Too Involved?

🍕 Girls Gotta Eat: Managing a Mama’s Boy (and His Mom)

💃 The girls have spoken

See last week’s poll results from So...do I need to break up with my friend? below. (Looks like no one who’s done it has regretted it lol.)

💌 Up Next

That’s all for today! If you liked this edition of Not That Personal, we think one of your friends probably will too – refer one (or two or three) below.

Have something to say? We’d love to hear it – reply to this email or leave an anonymous comment here.

Up next? So…am I supposed to love my job?

See you Friday ;)

💖 S & J