When your wife and your mother fight every day

Why it lands on you

Why do I always end up in the middle?

Because you are the only person in the house with a relationship to both of them that neither of them chose. Your mother did not choose your wife. Your wife did not choose your mother. Both of them chose you.

So every disagreement between them is, underneath, a question about you: whose house is this, whose word counts, who comes first now. Your mother has spent twenty-five years being the woman of the house. Your wife has arrived to a house where she is expected to belong and is not yet sure she does. Neither of them is being unreasonable to feel unsettled. They are both asking where they stand, and asking it through the salt in the sambar.

You are not the judge. You are the one person both of them trust. That is a heavier job than judging, and a more useful one.

The two moves that make it worse

I am trying to keep the peace. Why is it getting worse?

Most husbands do one of two things, and often one after the other.

The first is taking a side by reflex, usually the mother's, because she was there first and because contradicting her in front of the family feels impossible. It ends the argument that evening. It also tells your wife that in this house, she will lose, and she will stop bringing things to you and start fighting them herself.

The second is going quiet. You leave for work early, you stay on your phone, you say "adjust, she is old" to one and "adjust, she is new" to the other. It feels neutral. To both women it feels like being abandoned, and each of them concludes you secretly agree with the other.

There is a third move that looks helpful and is not: carrying messages. "Amma says you should..." Every message you carry arrives with your voice on it, and you become part of the argument instead of the way out of it.

What actually helps

So what do I actually say, and to whom?

Decide with your wife first, in private, before anything is said to anybody. Not about everything: about the two or three things that keep coming up. Usually the kitchen and the running of the house, money, and how much say each family has in your decisions.

Then you say it to your mother. You, not your wife, and not in the middle of an argument. Say it as yours: "We have decided she will manage the kitchen on weekends" is a decision. "She wants the kitchen" is an invitation to fight. Say it kindly, say it once, and do not apologise for it.

Your wife does the same with her own family, when her parents are the ones with too much say. Each person speaks to their own side. It works better almost every time, because a parent can hear something hard from their own child that they cannot hear from a daughter-in-law or son-in-law.

Finally, give each of them time on their own with you. Take your mother to the temple. Take your wife out for an hour. Much of the daily fighting is two people competing for a place that neither feels sure of. Time alone with you answers the question the fighting is asking.

When you all live under one roof

We live in a joint family. Is moving out the only answer?

No, and it is often not the answer at all. Couples who move out to escape the fighting sometimes find it follows them over the phone, because the decisions were never made. Couples who stay and make the decisions often find the house becomes bearable.

What a joint family does change is how much each small thing matters. In a shared kitchen there are forty small decisions a day, and each one can be a contest. So the agreements need to be more specific than they would be elsewhere: who cooks on which days, whose say goes on guests, where your wife can go to be alone.

And it changes what you owe your wife. She has moved into your family's house, often away from her own town. Some private space, some time with her own people, and some money of her own are not luxuries in that situation. They are what makes it liveable.