DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband and I are in our 50s. He has a friend I dislike: She uses humor to disguise insults, and she has no manners.
Once she was visiting and asked to be served wine -- wine that she then carelessly sloshed all over our living room walls and area rug. The rug was ruined, and she didn’t even mention replacing it. This is just one example.
How can I remove myself from this friendship while allowing my husband to maintain it?
GENTLE READER: Do you have a backyard? Or a porch? Or a basement?
It seems to Miss Manners that those would be good places for your husband to entertain his destructive friend, especially if he doesn’t want to keep repainting the walls and buying new rugs.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: My in-laws are socially conservative and very traditional. For the five years my now-husband and I dated, I was expected to refer to them as “Mr. and Mrs. Lastname,” a formality that made me feel distant and unwelcome, especially when my parents asked my husband to call them by their first names nearly immediately.
However, near the wedding, my in-laws began to switch their correspondence sign-offs to “Mom and Dad.” They later told my husband that that was their way of inviting me to refer to them as such -- a tradition in their family.
I was uncomfortable with this change. I felt bitter at having been relegated to “Mr. and Mrs. Lastname” despite being with my fiance for years, and the sudden switch to “Mom and Dad” felt like forced familiarity at best, or a power move at worst.
I would prefer to call them by their first names, which is the tradition in my family. I talked it over with my husband, who didn’t advocate for either side, and I ultimately decided to accept their bid for connection. I began a few emails and texts to them with “Mom” or “Dad.” It felt uncomfortable, but I thought it would bring them more joy than it did me discomfort.
I began to regret it almost immediately, when my attempts were met with confusion -- “Did you mean this email for me, or for your dad?” -- and then I regretted it fully after my mother-in-law’s behavior at the wedding itself, which bordered somewhere between thoughtless and actively cruel.
It now makes me too uncomfortable to call them “Mom and Dad” with any good grace or sincerity, and I’d like to walk it back entirely. How can I communicate that I’m not comfortable calling them “Mom and Dad,” and that I would prefer to use their first names, in a way that damages the relationship as little as possible?
GENTLE READER: What you would like, Miss Manners gathers, is a solution that would enable you to have your way, respond to your in-laws’ bad and contradictory behavior, and not damage the relationship.
Whew. But she will try.
Start addressing them again as “Mr. and Mrs. Lastname.” This will annoy them, as they asked you to do otherwise, but they cannot complain if you explain apologetically that you got used to those names after all those years.