Marriage.com.au: Resources for Healthy Marriages

When Parents Force You To Choose

It is no secret that life is about choices and so is marriage. One of the biggest choices you can make is selecting with whom you will live the rest of your life. This decision necessarily means excluding other alternatives such as your previous date, the person you may meet next week, or remaining single. Having a choice can involve fear of making the wrong one or of what you may lose in deciding a particular way.
Commitment to a relationship with another person can easily place you in a difficult position when loyalty to your partner necessitates making a stance concerning your friends or relatives. This is most evident when parents place a demand on your time or conformity to their standards and when submitting to this, places you in a difficult position with your partner. Typical examples are making wedding arrangements to suit parents, living where they wish to keep them happy, accepting their help so as to make them feel wanted, maintaining their traditions or cultures so as not to hurt them. Enormous pressure can be placed on both of you by your respective parents often without them having any awareness of what is troubling you. The forces to comply to your parents wishes can be very subtle; after all, you have known them longer than your partner.
Some of this “interfering” may not worry you provided both you and your partner agree that is either best for you or won't do you any harm. However if your parents want something which is against your partner's wishes, (or vice versa), you can get caught between two loyalties in which compromise is not always possible.
In this situation it is vital that you place the importance of your marriage relationship above all others. It may be that this means hurting someone else and you may feel very isolated as a couple because of some decisions. You probably wish you could make everyone happy so no one feels bad towards you. This is a dilemma which is not easily resolved and requires you to make a stand by which you risk damaging or losing some relationships, such as with your parents. Usually time heals these breakages and parents begin to understand that they were young once, but you cannot control what other people think of you.
Above all, by acknowledging the dilemma, communicating the problem to your partner, and placing them foremost in you decision making process, you make a profound statement about your loyalty, your commitment to your marriage, and the love you have for your partner. Everyone should admire that.