Where your two families will pull in different directions

The pattern

It rarely starts as a fight about a parent. It starts as a fight about a weekend, or a comment, or where you were for a holiday. The parent is the occasion. The actual problem is that the couple never decided what their rule was, so each of them defaults to the rule from their own childhood and is then genuinely bewildered by the other’s reaction.

Who speaks to whose parents

The single most protective agreement a couple can make. Each person handles the difficult conversation with their own family. It sounds obvious and is followed by almost nobody, because it is easier in the moment to let the more assertive partner handle both.

What leaves the marriage

Decide early what your families are told about your marriage. Not secrecy — boundary. A difficulty that is reported to a parent while it is unresolved acquires a permanent audience, and parents remember conflicts long after the couple has moved past them.

Two Jewish families, two sets of customs

When a couple comes from different Jewish backgrounds — Sephardic and Ashkenazi, Persian and American, observant and not — the friction usually shows up first at a wedding and then at holidays. Whose customs does the home follow, and for the ones you are not keeping, how do you explain that to the family who does keep them? That is a conversation the couple should have before either family asks.

When a family disapproves

Two things are worth separating. Is there any part of the concern worth listening to, honestly? And if the disapproval never changes, are you each prepared to marry anyway — and have you each actually said that out loud to the other? Couples who have not said it tend to discover the answer at the worst possible moment.