Whenever I start dating a person I think it’s important to take steps to discover certain aspects of their personality, beliefs and opinions. It’s mostly about compatibility and not wasting time on a person who just doesn’t jive well with me, but it’s about other things as well.
When my husband and I started dating I forgot about one very important aspect of my husband’s beliefs to check on. In fact, it had never really occurred to me with any boyfriend prior to him either. I neglected to pay special attention to his mannerisms with his family. Indeed I have come to see the extreme error in this negligence, as a person’s family determines much of who they are, why the do the things they do and feel the way the feel. It’s not that I didn’t pay attention to my previous partners’ relationships with their families, but I could see it for myself; their families were always local and I could pretty much immediately interact with them in their family life. My husband’s family, however, is located in different, mostly far off, parts of the country. Therefore I was not able to study his family interaction until we were much further into the relationship. I never met a single member of his family in the first year we dated. His views on family interaction and mine are in fact nothing alike. He works well being distanced from his family, while I have never left the town in which I was born and therefore have never been more than 20 minutes away from my mother at any time in my life. He has a rift with a certain close family member that dictates he does not speak with this person, and I cannot turn my back on a family member no matter what injustice they commit toward me. Since we got married and our families intertwined this has caused some issue. I try to push him to become closer to his family, which I realized, once I stopped to think about it, I have no right to do. But with them now being my family as well, I feel the need to become close to them as I am with my family. Now that I feel I have a right to. The moral of my little story is that you should always take care to root out how a prospective partner interacts with family and how their beliefs about family differ from your own. Just as it’s important to be on the same wave length about religious beliefs and children, you could also save yourself some considerable headache knowing their family values.