Personally, I think it would be unreasonable for the wife's family to expect her to come to every little gathering. An average of two get-togethers a month (which I take to mean that some months have more) is a lot of family time. She has her own family now and it's a lot to ask of her husband to go to a celebration every two weeks. She shouldn't impose her standards of familial interaction on him if he's maxed out on cousins for the month. He needs to explain this to her reasonably and not defensively. This situation reminds me of the recent letter with the woman who wanted her boyfriend to be more outgoing at parties. He's not that guy, so it ain't gonna happen and trying to make it happen won't end well for anyone.

My dad has a lot of extended family (second cousins and such) that he enjoys seeing about once a year when they have a reunion. My mom can't see them that often, as at this point in time the only living people left that she knows are my dad, his brother and sister and their small families. So he goes alone most of the time and has a good old time talking to everyone while my mom takes that Saturday to watch movies he doesn't like. Win/win.

I love the phrase, "as much you'd rather be fishing, golfing or dead."

That's about how I feel about family gatherings. And I don't even like fishing or golfing.

All major holidays? What about HIS family?

How long is attendance required?

Perhaps the compromise is a quick drop in, quickly say "hi" to all, wish cousin Jack a happy 61st, and leave shortly thereafter to finish "fixing that toilet".

If wife thinks he needs to stay for some three hour dinner and conversation get together every two weeks, well, #$%^ that.

Oh, and people, your birthday is *not* important. And you should stop expecting other people to treat it as important--or even recognize it much--about the age of, oh, thirteen. Okay? Just in case you didn't realize that.

I may not be the best person to take advice from, but here's my suggestion: let her be upset. That's way too many family events for most people, no matter how close the family is. It's not your job to cave to all her demands or to "make her happy" by being a doormat for her to wipe her feet on - she won't like that either.

If I were you, I would agree to go to a few of the more important events over the year - maybe have her choose the 4-6 of those (or how ever many you think you can stomach - start with a low ball, then do the "Oh OK, I'll go to 4 then" after you've said 2 - let her think she 'won' something).

Question: Why are you afraid of her being upset? Is she your wife or your mother? That she didn't get upset over it while you were dating but does now shows you something important: her emotional reaction is a choice she makes for herself and it is an attempt to manipulate you. You do not control her emotions, she does. This is what women do, and the sooner you show you won't be manipulated (but are willing to work on a compromise), the better for everyone.

My Dh goes to maybe half our family things, and we don't have that many. I make more of his, because skipping to stay home just feels weird to me. Frankly, I wouldn't WANT him there always, it's MY family, sometimes I want time with them.

"This is what women do, and the sooner you show you won't be manipulated (but are willing to work on a compromise), the better for everyone."

Between this and your previous column comments, I feel comfortable asking: WHo damaged you? There has got to be a reason your hate women. DId she screw around on you? leave and make you pay child support? What? And why does the entire rest of the gender have to be judged by her actions?

It's funny. It is the opposite in my family. I do things with my family alone, with my hubby, whatever. There's probably 3 events a year he "has" to come to. I, on the other hand, have to go to all the dinners, events with his family or he's very hurt and upset. He's getting better over the years. I get out of a few now but it took a few years.
I think I stopped acting like they were a chore and then it wasn't so bad and then he loosened up about it all. Then when I said "Can I skip this one?" He thought "Well, she's really made the effort lately" and said "Yeah, no problem"

Let's all grow up and talk things over and have good, healthy relationships. Ya know, ones where the wife isn't a manipulative bitch and the husband isn't a abuser, cheater, whatever. One where you actually TRY to make the OTHER person happy even though you don't always get your way.
Anyway, I'm rambling...

Between this and your previous column comments, I feel comfortable asking: WHo damaged you? There has got to be a reason your hate women. DId she screw around on you? leave and make you pay child support? What? And why does the entire rest of the gender have to be judged by her actions?

lol First, I am a woman, so most of these questions don't apply, but just look at that list of assumptions! I just know that women can be idiotic manipulative twats and I don't care if I'm giving the game away. Have I said anything untrue? This IS what the vast majority of women do - try to manipulate men with emotional outbursts. Open your eyes and look around you.

I don't hate women, I just don't care for bullshit and childishness. Who damaged me is irrelevant at this point. Brutal honesty isn't necessarily the result of damage and even if it is, it doesn't necessarily make it unworthy of attention. Glad you feel so comfortable prying into such things though - nothing is more important than feewings, after all.

Thag, other than the fact that I am an only child, you could be my long lost sister. You don't sound damaged at all to me, just realistic. I have seen both men and women pull childish bullshit, but the ratio of women to men doing it seems to be about 10 to 1 in favor of the women. Isabel

Did these people even know each other before they got married? How did he not realize how important her family is to her before he married her? Trust me, if I noticed my future husband having to show up for dinner every Wednesday and birthday parties every other week, that would have been a deal breaker for me or at least cause for a really long discussion. Something tells me that what he heard was, "its okay to pick and choose" and what she really said was, "its okay to pick and choose... if you want to break my heart and shame me in front of my whole family with your selfish and standoffish behavior." Thag is right, sometimes women put the important stuff in the subtext. Its not fair and I won't defend that, but if your eyes had been open you would have seen what you were getting into with this family.

The bottomline is this,you married her and now to keep the peace in your home you are into her family for life. Either that, or you could take a job out of state. Good luck.

Do couples actually TALK to each other, or do they wait until they get an answer they like from an advice column and wave it in the other guy's face and say "See? I'm right!"?

I'm a hermit crab, and my husband knows it. There were a lot of family gatherings before his mom died. Same thing with my own family--when the matriarch passed on, so did the big family get-togethers.

When he would be unhappy with me for not wanting to visit his family, I would gently remind him that since my family was in Michigan, he had been spared the whole visiting the in-laws thing. He could see my side, since he is not much more sociable than I am.

I like his family, but I'm not big on family gatherings. I go to them when I feel like it, and sometimes I make myself feel like it, for his sake. I always have a good time too, once I get there. When I really don't want to go, I stay home. It's quite simple. Grown-ups can do this.

On parties and bringing your significant other, Gregg is great one-on-one, but hates crowds of people and being around a lot of strangers and needing to make chit-chat with them. When he's in Detroit, I sometimes call him up and tell him, "Honey, guess what: There's a party tonight, and you're thousands of miles away and can't possibly go!" Never understand people who think the right thing to do is something that makes the person they supposedly love miserable. And I agree about birthdays for anyone over 12.

"This IS what the vast majority of women do"

What high school are you attending? I've not noticed this being the norm by any stretch of the imagination. By the way, having emotions and on occasion daring to talk about them with your SO is NOT emotional manipulation. You want someone who never has an emotion, buy a teddy bear.

"This IS what the vast majority of women do"

What high school are you attending?

Is that supposed to burn? Well, sorry if I don't automatically feel a kinship toward someone because we have a vagina in common. I advocated the husband showing that he has a spine while also offering a compromise, best of both worlds. I'm pretty sure most women will not feel anything but contempt toward a man without a spine in the long run, so it's better for her to be "upset" in the short term for the long term gain of being able to respect her husband. No respect, no attraction. It's a shit test.

BTW, act like a child, get treated like one. This is what children do, they get upset when things don't go their way. Have you considered the fact that she changed the rules on him? Do you not see the bait and switch here?

I think a lot could be accomplished by following the advice of the little graphic at the top of Marc Rudov's page. So much with so little.

http://thenononsenseman.com/

Momof4, if you're saying women don't do that, you're blind, sheltered, surrounded by feminine saints, or nuts (or perhaps more than one of those categories at a time). I'll bet I've dated a LOT more of them than you have.

I LIKE Thag, she's on point.

Daring to talk "about" emotions isn't manipulation, but BLUDGEONING someone with them, with the only sure fire certainty that it will stop being to cave and go along with it, certainly is.

And Thag is DOUBLE RIGHT about the shit test.

Momof4, if you're saying women don't do that, you're blind, sheltered, surrounded by feminine saints, or nuts (or perhaps more than one of those categories at a time). I'll bet I've dated a LOT more of them than you have.

I LIKE Thag, she's on point.

Daring to talk "about" emotions isn't manipulation, but BLUDGEONING someone with them, with the only sure fire certainty that it will stop being to cave and go along with it, certainly is.

And Thag is DOUBLE RIGHT about the shit test.

A pox upon the devil of the double post, pardon me folks! :)

"Have you considered the fact that she changed the rules on him? Do you not see the bait and switch here?"

This was my first thought. There is a saying that women get married hoping he will change and men get married hoping she won't.

"Do couples actually TALK to each other... ?"

Exactly. My wife talked about everything. I bought a book on topics to discuss before marriage and we set aside an evening a week to talk about each topic. I actually found this site because we had been discussing things we had read in advice columns and I was looking for more.

My guess is that it wasn't terribly important for her boyfriend to attend these things, but her husband is a different matter. Now he's family and expected to participate.

Still, there should be room for compromise here. Couples do lots of things just to make each other happy, so it's reasonable for him to attend some of these functions, and it's reasonable for her to let him off the hook on some of them.

Communicating... with each other.. ought to be the first step. Crazy!

They can compromise. Decide which events to attend as a couple, which ones can be skipped and which ones she can attend solo, or they can make a brief appearance at to satisfy the familial obligations.

If it were me, I'd get out a calendar and pencil in all the birthdays and such and make sure the husband's side of the family is not forgotten. Seeing the sheer numbers of dates that people are expecting an appearance/gift/ can be enlightening.

Being more demanding or needy is not the same as being more important.

On the other hand, having a close and supportive extended family can be a huge benefit, especially when you are raising kids.

About the "this is what women do" comment: Men do it, too. Often. I hang out at a website for people with problematic inlaw relationships, and it is HUGELY common for women to be dealing with a husband who cannot say "no" to his mommy, who insists that they show up for every event she can manufacture, and to accuse her of "hating his family" if she wants to, you know, maybe have the occasional event in her own home, or Sunday night to herself, or whatever.

Word to the wise:

If someone you're dating hates to or refuses to do something...they will not magically love it after marriage, they will hate or refuse to do it then. If they DO give way, they'll be annoyed and angry, and that will only compound itself with every subsequent accomadation.

I'd just like to say a bit in support for Momof4...I have an older brother who is one of the most emotionally manipulative people I know.

He's stood the entire family up for Christmases, and played all sorts of headgames with my elderly mother in order to get money out of her. While she was on what we thought was her deathbed, he started showing up at the hospital everyday, sucking up to her and to the doctors in a way that made me want to heave.

And of course, in the meantime, he was already planning behind the scenes to move his family into her home (without telling any of us, the rest of the family). It was only because he bragged about it to one of my mom's neighbour's that we were able to take legal steps to stop him before it happened. And now that I have my mom's power of attorney and I don't put up with his BS, he's deciding to be angry and pouty and is going around telling everyone how crazy and unfair all of us are being to him.

The older I get, the more I see that that both genders play emotional games to get what they want. And, now that I'm the main caregiver to a sick and elderly mother, and there's work to be done, my brother is nowhere to be seen. I actually changed my phone number after I took over my mother's care. I couldn't take his self-pity, anger and rage over his not getting what he wanted for once.

Since this happened a year or so ago, I've spoken to other people about problematic siblings (when the last parent is ill and there's an inheritance at stake). I can tell you the bad behaviour, from what I'm hearing, is pretty much split down the middle, although saying that, I see a lot more women doing the actual work of caregiving.

I've said it before and I'll say it now: I don't think sticking it to either gender makes a lot of sense.

Men do it, too. Often. I hang out at a website for people with problematic inlaw relationships, and it is HUGELY common for women to be dealing with a husband who cannot say "no" to his mommy

This is a different issue - the man here is under his mother's thumb, not doing these things because he wants to per se. He is allowing his mother to manipulate him and to manipulate his marriage - again, it's a woman doing the manipulating.

Another case in which the female (mom) needs to grow up and the male (son) needs to grow a pair. This kind of thing generally presents before marriage as well - I've dated a mamma's boy who actually told me, "don't make this a choice between you and my mum, because you'll lose." Best not to marry men with mothers who refuse to cut the apron strings.

ie, I don't see that I'm "sticking it" to either sex here. If the husband caves, he (and she) will eventually end up with a sexless dead marriage, because he will end up caving to all her unreasonable demands and she will see him as having no backbone, which is not sexy. Standing up for himself and offering compromise helps the marriage. In this case, it seems to be that the wife is manipulating through "getting upset," which is why I and others have been talking about women being manipulative.

What you describe of your brother isn't the same kind of emotional display that women use in relationships. Like Dana's example, it's not the same thing. Sure it's pretty low, but it really doesn't relate much to this question and seems like more a personality defect than normal shit testing. No one said men aren't capable of being crappy, it's just not really relevant to this post. Nor am I saying women are terrible people for doing what they do but if people know these things, they can be dealt with better. There will be more shit tests where this one came from, so he might as well know what that's all about.

This may not be a shit test. Coming from a big, domineering family, I know how important it can be for spouses to show up at these things. When they don't, they're sacked with all kinds of nasty labels, and people start making assumptions about the health of the marriage. This could be her way of keeping family relationships healthy.

Or it could be a shit test. She could be testing his attachment to the very notion of family.

Thag, I don't want to get into with you here, because I do agree with you sometimes. Really.

But my brother's behaviour is EXACTLY like what you're describing. When he doesn't get what he wants, he throws a fit and then everyone around him caves because it's easier. My father was the same. My mother often said things like "If you stop arguing back, he'll [my father] will have no one to argue with," and "walk away, it's not worth it," and "one person can't argue with himself." The men were the divas in my family, is what I'm saying Thag.

OK, ie, you didn't seem to be saying he threw fits, so point taken.

MonicaP, if "keeping family relationships healthy" means showing up so they don't gossip behind your back, I'd rather do without the family. Makes me glad I don't have to deal with that crap.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Spot on, as usual Amy!

"Coming from a big, domineering family, I know how important it can be for spouses to show up at these things. When they don't, they're sacked with all kinds of nasty labels"

And they actually enjoy these gatherings? 'Go or else'? Not for each others' company but to avoid getting shredded afterwards? My mother's family was like that, it was horrible. My punishment for getting married before my older cousin was one side of the family staying away from my wedding, and cutting off all contact. I'd tell them all to go pack it where the sun doesn't shine.

You might want to suggest that her family combine the birthday celebrations. If you have a monthly birthday party, that would cut down on the number of events, and make it easier for everyone involved. I host family get-togethers sometimes, and it's a lot of work to get everything spic and span before everyone comes over. Plus, there's the issue of coordinating the meals and everyone's schedules. They might appreciate the suggestion. Just put for the arguments that benefit everyone, and keep mum about how maybe you'll finally get to do what YOU want to do on the weekend.

You might want to suggest that her family combine the birthday celebrations.

My mother does that. At one point, with immediate family and their partners only, we had five birthdays in one month - my mother, brother, sister, and two long term girlfriends (one no longer, the other now a sister in law). Three in one week. We combined them into two family dinners in an "early Feb/late Feb" deal.

But we all like seeing each other and no one in my family is precious enough to be pissed off if someone can't make it one year because they have something important to do. Sometimes people turn up on the actual birthdays as well, but that's always a more "if you feel like it" kind of thing. And given my mother's cooking we often do :)

Men do it, too. Often. I hang out at a website for people with problematic inlaw relationships, and it is HUGELY common for women to be dealing with a husband who cannot say "no" to his mommy

Ahh, the mommy's boys who can't say no. I have ex-friends like that. From what I've seen Dana, anyone who gets in that position may as well give up at the start - the more the wife tries to make the overgrown child pay attention to her, the more threatened mommy will feel, and the more she will poison hubby against the wife. And the boys are so used to being looked after by mother they are terrified of losing them.

I was just thinking of my ex-husband. He refused to propose on Christmas Day because his mom wouldn't let him come over.

He was 25 years old.

haha my extended family is HUGE and very close. And even then, we only have "family events" three-ish times a year unless someone dies or pops out a kid, in which case there MIGHT be the added baptism or funeral.

...and to be honest, I'd rather my boyfriend stay at home! I want to stay as long as I want, catch up with my cousins and share all our weird family inside jokes without having to worry if the BF wants to go home.

LW, just move out of town. I'm so thankful I don't share a city with any of my family. They're great, but I don't have to be around them all of the time.

This sounds pretty similar to mine and my hubby's situation. He comes from a large, emotionally manipulative, obnoxious family that has some sort of a thing every 3-6 weeks. They demand attendance and are pretty freakin' obnoxious when you don't show up.
When we got engaged, we worked out a deal so that we did Thanksgiving with my folks, the annual Christmas Eve party with his family, Christmas morning home, and Christmas afternoon with my folks.

That first Thanksgiving, Hubby got more than 20 phone calls from his family. First, they were asking when he'd arrive, then expressing shock that he wasn't coming, and finally shrieking outrage that he had "betrayed his family."

I had the same thing happen with my wife, she would decide what we were doing vis a vis family functions, leave me out of it! Some of her family is interesting to be around, but most of them are boring. This fellow has to make a compremise with his wife about which events are manditory (Christmas, Easter) and which ones are not (birthdays). And then he needs to tell her that

'this is the way its going to be, and if you do not like it, I suggest we call it a day, it was fun while it lasted, and I will always cherish the last 10 years with you as the happiest years of my life' This is what I told my wife when all her family events were starting to infringe on my spare time.

Here is something for al you women to consider when you are thinking of the mama's boy.

How may mom's do I have? One
How many women find me attractive? Hmm lets see...global population of 7 billion, half women =3.5 billion, women in my age bracket = 2.0 Billion, out of these how many would be into me? even at 1% it works out to a couple of 100 million.

So what makes you so special, that I would abandon my mother? By the way, depending on the arguement, and the relavenace I will side with my mother or my wife depending on who is right. The first time this happened my wife was rather shocked that I did not stand by he rside, she asked why, and I said 'because you are wrong'

See how simple math is?