Recently the Man and I have been spending more time than usual with each other's families. That combined with my usual gripe-fests with my assorted girlfriends has prompted some thoughts on families in general, and the way people are raised. There have been all sorts of studies done on nature versus nurture and the role parenting plays on the person we become. I don't really read all sorts of studies, but I do observe people and form my own opinions on my own small focus groups.
According to my (admittedly limited) research, I am fully convinced that while opposites may attract in the world of magnets and teenage hormones, in the long run for relationships, you really do need to have something in common- and doesn't it stand to reason that parenting would fall into that category? Also, if your spouse or significant other was raised in a family with polar opposite viewpoints from yours (and you agree with your family's viewpoints), you're eventually going to look at him or her as if he was raised on the moon.
For the Man and I, things are pretty smooth. Our parents' philosophies on child-rearing, work ethics, and general lifestyles are basically the same. While there are obviously some differences, they aren't fundamental. The biggest thing, though, is we both agree with the way we were raised, and agree that it's basically the way any future generations should be raised. We're not into new-age parenting where the children set their own limits and run roughshod over the household, we agree that a healthy dose of fear is good for all parent-child relationships, and have a sarcastic sense of humor passed down from our fathers.
Our parents are all God-fearing (or at least loving) right-leaning conservatives, and we inherited that, too. A relationship where one of us was an atheist liberal hippie would be strained, to say the least. Tolerance of others is one thing. Cohabitation and creating a life together is quite another, and while there are couples who make it work, we know one another and ourselves well enough to know it isn't for us.
I have a friend whose husband was raised by parents whose philosophy on life is sort of... out of touch with the rest of the world. The father, while physically present for his children's lives, was emotionally absent. The mother was perhaps too tolerant, and both parents blamed (and still do) society for all of their children's misdeeds. Instead of having to learn from their mistakes like most of the rest of us, the children learned that they never really made any mistakes, and someone would always cover for them. My friend, on the other hand, was born in the south, where manners were taught in the womb, and you owned up to mistakes before you even made them. So these two people are now married- the person apologizing for every wrong, no matter how slight, and the person who believes he can do no wrong. It makes for an interesting combination, to say the least.
My friend's mother thinks her son in law is not chivalrous enough and doesn't take care of her daughter properly, and the husband's mother thinks her daughter in law is at fault for every trial the young couple faces, since clearly her son can not do anything wrong. The extended family's combined outside forces being so at odds seem to put an additional strain on this marriage that is already so blatantly (at least to me) warring in its ideals of what a man and a woman should be doing.
I have another friend who is so close to her family it's almost creepy to some people. To me, it's completely normal because I've known her since childhood, and they are simply a really tight knit family. However, her husband doesn't even know who his father is, and hasn't seen his mother in several years. There's no bad blood between them, they simply aren't close and he has no reason, to his way of thinking, to see her. I have to wonder what they think of each other's family dynamics- him of hers, the family that literally lives with several generations under the same roof, and her of his, the family that goes years between visits?
Perhaps love will keep them all alive- or at least carry them through the rough patches where they look at each other and believe that they must have been raised by wolves. Perhaps I am so narrow minded that I simply cannot accept anything outside my own small view of what's normal. Perhaps I'm just truly blessed to have in laws (and outlaws) that I can relate (har har) to and spend large amounts of time with without wondering when they're going to be beamed back up to the mother ship. Either way, I suppose as long as everyone's happy, that's really all that matters.
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