39 Times MILs Overstepped So Much People Just Had To Vent Online (August Edition)

Whether it’s constantly dropping in unannounced, making the occasional subtle but snide remark at the dinner table, or making their thoughts on how you do things known, shall we say, less delicately, we’ve all seen our fair share of pushy mothers-in-law. I mean, they’re practically pop culture’s favorite villains. But as lists like this show, the meddling mother-in-law stereotype is hardly confined to fiction, and plenty of people have learned firsthand that in-law conflicts are very real.

In fact, that might just be one thing couples and mothers-in-law agree on: a 2022 study published in Evolutionary Psychological Science found that men and women in the US “reported more conflict with mothers-in-law than with mothers, and mothers reported more conflict with their daughters-in-law than with their daughters.”

One reason these relationships can be particularly tricky is that families are essentially “microcultures,” explains Professor Christine E. Kunkle, PhD, who has researched family and mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships. Each has its own patterns of behavior, traditions, rituals, and expectations. This family culture, she says, is “like water to a fish”—easy to overlook when we’ve been swimming in it all the time. It’s only when we’re dropped into someone else’s water that, as Oprah Daily writer Rory Evans puts it, we “notice every detail, every tiny little bothersome bit of flotsam.”

Psychologist Terri Apter, author of the 2009 book What Do You Want From Me? Learning to Get Along with In-laws, offers a similar perspective. She refers to our “blood families” as a kind of “very powerful template” that gets to the very core of who we are, and notes that we often don’t even realize we’re referring back to it. This “template,” she explains, teaches us how to behave and guides us in “the ways in which life may be lived and understood.” Within a family, she says, “there will be rules about how loud you can speak, how much emotion you can show, either positive or negative.” That’s why, she says, there are always cultural differences when two families overlap, and why we don’t always realize how deep these are.

This may help explain why we sometimes find it easier to connect with our own relatives than our in-laws. As Professor Gretchen Perry, co-author of In-Law Relationships in Evolutionary Perspective: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, explains, people tend to share more beliefs, interests, and mutual understanding with their immediate families than with their in-laws, where there’s “less of an overlap in common agreement.”

And when it comes to mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, the picture can be even more complicated. As BBC features correspondent Megan Carnegie explains, research has long suggested that “a woman and her mother-in-law are more likely to clash than male members of the family.” Apter’s research, conducted over more than two decades, found that 60% of women said their relationship with a female in-law caused them long-term unhappiness and stress. They described these relationships with terms including “strained,” “uncomfortable,” “infuriating,” “depressing,” “draining,” and “simply awful.”

Experts have suggested that patriarchal traditions and gendered stereotypes may help explain why these relationships can be particularly fraught. As Apter is quoted as saying, “Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflict often emerges from an expectation that each is criticizing or undermining the other, but this mutual unease may have less to do with actual attitudes and far more to do with persistent female norms that few of us manage to shake off completely.”

And those norms are reinforced by the way these relationships are portrayed more broadly. As Carnegie notes, “a potent mix of patriarchal traditions, media tropes and characters in pop culture also popularise the idea that in-law relationships will be tense at best, toxic at worst—especially among women.”