Q & A Table of Contents
My Marriage Is Over-populated
From: Prem, Chennai, India
Question: I recently got married. My wife is a doctor and I am a software engineer. Of late there has
been too much interference from my father in law. He has been accusing me of not taking enough care of his
daughter and is always in a very high state of paranoia.
I am a bit short-tempered and so is my wife. She claims that I haven't provided her enough for her to be
happy. On the contrary, I arranged for the initial payment in cash for her post graduate studies. In
addition to that she has made a huge cry for a separate house, which was also accepted.
Now my wife verbally abuses me and her father claims that my father, my mother, and I are harassing my wife
for money -- which is untrue. I am earning a decent amount which is more than enough to provide us a
decent living. My wife doesn't earn anything.
My father-in-law is a real headache and has created a lot of problems. He telephones my parents at midnight
and abuses them.
I started responding to my father-in-law’s nastiness with equivalent nastiness to balance off what he has
started.
How do I handle such people (wife and father in law)? In spite of repeated requests not to poke his nose
into my family life, my father-in-law doesn't listen. Peter continues to poke his nose. My wife also says
she cant be responsible for her father’s action. How do I go about solving this problem?
Response: You are describing an escalating spiral of (verbal) violence — with no indication of whether
either side took the original wrong step that has led to this extraordinarily ugly situation. Escalating
verbal abuse guarantees greater difficulty in finding a mutually acceptable resolution.
Your first step should be to examine what you want — not what you don’t want. If your underlying objective
is to have a happy marriage, you need to figure out what you mean by a ‘happy marriage’. Simply defining
happiness as the disappearance of abuse (in either direction) may be a bit short-sighted. Examine your
interests and try to get a clear understanding of the options available to you (what negotiators call your
BATNA — Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). How much do you have to gain or lose by taking a
decisive step — in any direction?
You also have to develop as clear an understanding as possible of your wife’s interests — and her BATNA.
If the two of you can focus on your interests in your conversations, it may well be that external factors
can be handled more satisfactorily. For example, if each of you feels that being free of parental
intrusion would be favorable, perhaps you should consider moving to another location. Both computer
engineers and doctors are likely to be able to find new jobs more easily than folks in many other
professions.
If you and your wife are motivated to be happy together, perhaps you can take small steps to de-escalate
the issues about which you have been arguing. Getting away from both sets of parents might possibly help —
but one short-term option is for you to speak only with your parents and your wife to speak only with hers.
The further job related to that is for each of you to ‘forget’ to deliver unfriendly messages sent along
by one set of parents to you or your wife or the in-laws.
You should have different standards for the behavior of your wife and her father. Hopefully you and she
can interact on a favorable level. But perhaps you should expect her father to misbehave. That way,
whenever he does something unpleasant you can congratulate yourself for predicting such actions — and when
he is behaving nicely, you can be pleasantly surprised. Your parents may be wisest getting a new phone
number if they don’t want late night harassing phone calls.
Another thought process you ought to consider is to figure out how to minimize your losses. If things are
only going to go downhill, you need to figure out how to protect yourself from unfortunate consequences.
Sadly it sounds as if the situation has been handled very badly — and achieving a happy result will require
a radical use of creativity on the part of both yourself and your wife. If the two of you are motivated to
work together you will succeed. If either or both of you is only interested in continuing the battle, the
end is not promising. Analyze your interests — and yourself. Do the same with your wife. Ask questions
to find out whether your assumptions are accurate — and proceed accordingly.
Good luck,
Steve
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