Maybe you can remember the day that you found out who your new college roommate was going to be. In my case, because I went to college before the days of email, I got the news in a letter from the college that included a form that my roommate had filled out answering some questions about what they liked and didn’t like. As I hurriedly scanned through the list of answers, I found out that my roommate liked hunting, was an early-riser, and generally liked to keep to himself.
He couldn’t have been more different than me. I’d never been hunting. I loved to stay up late. And I loved being around people.
For the next few months, I was full of anxiety. What was I going to do? Did I need to change? Would we get along at all?
Looking back, what strikes me most is that my anxiety was entirely focused on me. It never occurred to me to wonder what my roommate was thinking when he opened my profile and discovered that I was a soccer-playing night owl who loved being around people.
The reality was that we were both transitioning into a radically new situation, and both transitions were happening at the same time.
The same thing is true for the transitions that began on every couple’s wedding day.
A Big Change for the Entire Family
On the one hand there are all the things that the newly married couple is facing as they begin a brand-new life together. How will they spend their time? How will they resolve differences? How will they make their schedules work so that they can spend time together? And most importantly, who takes out the trash!
On the other hand, is the life change that the parents of the bride and groom are undergoing. They wonder: Will they call us or should we call them? Do they have enough money to survive? What if they get in a huge fight, should we intervene? And what in the world are we supposed to do with all this love and emotion that we have for this child that used be under our roof, but is now knit together to another person that we are just getting to know?
Every new wedding creates two simultaneous and life-altering transitions, one for the newlyweds and the other for their parents.
This is precisely what makes Genesis 2:24 so profound. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” We often focus on the leaving from the perspective of the bride and groom. But every act of leaving also means that someone is being left. Marriage creates a new family bond, and everyone connected to that bond must learn to navigate a new reality.
I’ve been a pastor for over twenty-five years and the most common counseling situations I deal with, even more than marital conflict between spouses, is conflict that has arisen between a young married couple and their parents.
Sometimes the young couple approaches me about what to do about feeling pressured to do something by one or both sets of their parents. Or it may be the parents of a newly married couple who come to me to sort out the feeling that they are being ignored by their newly married kids.
Why does this happen so often?
Let’s think about three of the most common reasons.
Our Short-Term Memories
First, we forget that we’ve been here before.
It’s all too easy for parents to forget what it was like for them when they first got married. Surely, they had their own learning curve to go through with their parents in the early days of their marriage. Likewise, it’s easy for newlyweds to forget about those moments in their own lives when they felt shut out or marginalized by their own friends.
One of the best things we can do when a conflict happens is to intentionally call to mind the past experiences that we had in our own lives and then make a determination to do at least one of the things we struggled with then, better now.
Upside Down and Inside Out
Second, weddings create a different context for everyone.
Major life changes, like a marriage, reshuffle a lot of things in our lives. Imagine coming back into your home after a lengthy vacation and finding out that someone had rearranged everything in your house. Yes, you’d recognize your house and everything in it, but because everything was in a different place it would take some time to figure it all out again.
In the same way, when a couple marries, God creates a new family bond. The old relationships have not disappeared, but they have been rearranged. We certainly recognize and love our family of origin, but now, it’s been rearranged and we need to work toward a new normal, with a new understanding about how things should work in a new context.
Unspoken Expectations
Finally, it is often anxiety, not malice, that lies beneath the conflict that can occur between newly married couples and their parents.
Newlyweds worry about disappointing their parents. Parents worry about losing connection with their children. Expectations multiply, and when those expectations remain unspoken, anxiety rises. Left unchecked, that anxiety often expresses itself as frustration, criticism, defensiveness, or anger.
One of the key ways to avoid careening off into anger is to recognize that what you really need to work through are the expectations. If these can be broadly agreed to, then the anxiety present in the family system can be much better managed.
Extending a Healthy Dose of Grace
So, what happened with me and my very different roommate?
We lasted only one semester together. But there was never a fight, never an accusation, and never any anger. We simply came to understand that we were different, and that was okay.
Weddings are obviously far more significant than college roommates. Yet the lesson is surprisingly similar. The newlyweds and their parents are all navigating a new reality at the same time. The sooner we recognize that everyone involved is adjusting, grieving, hoping, and learning, the more patience and grace we can extend to one another.
If you’re a newlywed, take time to consider what your parents may be experiencing as they adjust to this new season.
If you’re a parent, take time to remember what it felt like to be newly married and trying to establish your own household.
Every wedding creates two simultaneous transitions. Understanding that truth may not eliminate all the tension, but it can help us approach one another with a little more empathy and a lot more grace.
When Your Child Says “I Do”
Many Christian parents are familiar with the Bible’s teaching that married couples leave their parents and cleave to each other. But what does this mean for the couple’s parents? How does their relationship with their child change? And what about the relationship with their new son- or daughter-in-law? The challenges faced by the parents of newlyweds are often overlooked. But Chris Polski draws on Scripture and personal experience to provide thoughtful and practical guidance for parents seeking to build healthy relationships with their children and children-in-law.
How to Relate to Parents After Your Marriage
When you get married, your relationship with your parents naturally changes. It can be hard to navigate this new terrain with its shifting roles and responsibilities. How do you balance the biblical command to honor your parents with your new commitment to putting your spouse first? How do you handle tricky matters like where to spend holidays and how to handle unwanted advice? It’s easy to feel torn. Chris Polski offers biblical and practical wisdom to help you and your spouse handle this transition with grace.
