On Sat, 2014-07-12 at 01:08 +0530, harry wrote: > Is family incompatibility really relevant anymore ? I don't see many > couples living with their parents in the same house. Also, if you are > from > different countries - chances are even if your families are completely > incompatible - language barrier and geographical distance will make > this > family incompatibility irrelevant (If there is no common language > between > the families, it simply isn't possible to directly communicate).
I think a lot depends on luck. Among Indian families I find, nowadays, in Bangalore, elderly parents who are being looked after by one sibling among many because this person lives in the same city as his or her parents and the others are away. A time may come in life - after 10 or more years of marriage where both husband and wife agree (or not agree but do, anyway) that parents need to be helped and how that is done and how the work is shared can lead to problems that were not apparent earlier. In an ideal world we should live like dogs where our parents are forgotten after we leave them and our children are discarded as gone after they achieve sexual maturity. But then again, dogs don't marry and therefore do not divorce. Humans and genetics have a strange way of passing on characteristics to children from one side of the family - characteristics that are not always pleasant. Depending on how the parents cope, this might (or might not) lead to conflicts that one could not have imagined when one left one's parents in law 10,000 miles away. Understanding that a spouse's personality has been moulded by his or her upbringing and being understanding of where that person might be "coming from", as it were, might be a better way to cope than "out of sight, out of mind" shiv
