Dear Carolyn: My fiancée and I can’t agree on how to spend Christmas as a couple. She has one sister, who is single, and they were raised by a single mom after the death of their father. For Christmas, their mother pays for a vacation somewhere — places I have no interest in going, like all-inclusive resorts. If I join them, we would need our own room, either an added expense for their mom or our entire vacation budget for a trip I don’t want to go on. My fiancée also hates these resorts but doesn’t want to rock the boat.
There are also uncomfortable family dynamics at play. They are tightknit but bicker and snap at each other, and the sister also resents me because it’s been just the three of them for decades and I am intruding.
Meanwhile, I come from a huge and happy extended family. We very rarely have any arguing or cattiness. Christmas is the only time we can all be together.
My fiancée loves my family but is (rightfully) devoted to hers. She wants to alternate holidays. I don’t want to miss my own family holidays. To my thinking, four adults can easily make up Christmas at a later time, whereas a family of 50 cannot. She wants to be with her family on Christmas Day. I have invited hers to join mine, but the sister is not interested.
I have also suggested separate Christmases with our families of origin, but she wants us to celebrate as our own family unit. I won’t sacrifice my fun family time for her tense, expensive family time.
Can you see a way to resolve this? — Clueless From Whoville
Clueless From Whoville: I would love to help figure a way, straight from my nerdy soul. Such an interesting emotional word problem.
But. I can’t help — or at least shouldn’t, for your own good. Testing their ability to resolve issues like this is exactly how engaged couples find out whether marrying each other is a good idea. That is, assuming they have sense and strength not to push it off to some fictional, easier “later.”
See this through now, because you and your fiancée will hit some version of the same wall for the rest of your time together.
Because you are a pragmatist, and she is a romantic.
You: can’t imagine missing out on 50 people you love only to spend money you don’t have on travel to places you don’t like so you can be with people who don’t want you there, just because a calendar, which you don’t acknowledge as a legitimate authority, says you have to choose one or the other. (Fellow pragmatist here, full disclosure.)
She: will cherish trips she doesn’t enjoy because the tradition of doing so means more to her than her comfort, and she will go on the exact day because that is the tradition’s taproot, and she will want you there, grudgingly or not, welcome or not, because being with her chosen life partner is as much the point as upholding the tradition in the first place.
The world is better for both types. Truly. But tempting as it is to declare that your marriage will be the better, too, and to wrangle a system where each of you sacrifices just enough, that would be superficial. What a marriage that isn’t grindingly miserable wants instead is something more broadly applicable:
1. Ungrudging acceptance, from both of you, that you see the world differently. Full stop.
2. Confidence that these different priorities will assert themselves continuously. In where you live, whom you see, what you plan, where you stay, how you work, what you spend, whether and how you rear children.
