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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband calls his parents every week, without any reminders from me.  Men aren't "naturally" bad at this; they are socialized that maintaining family relationships is women's work, and they don't develop the habit of doing so.  And there are often no consequences, because some woman picks up the slack.  [/quote]

Yup, this. I vividly recall being newly married and my husband--who was a self-sufficient adult--looking at me and asking me what I was going to get his parents and sister for Christmas, two days before the holiday. "But my mom always handled those things for my dad!" Those first couple years were ROUGH because he just assumed that I, like every woman in his family, would take on 100% of maintaining relationships with both our families. But I didn't and refused to be guilted into it.

FWIW, my brothers are pretty terrible at this stuff, too. As much as I love my dad, we did not see him taking the lead on family relationships with his side. Complicated, I think, by the fact that our mother lost her father when she was young and my paternal grandfather filled that void for her and they genuinely loved and cared about each other, so she was the one shopping for him and calling him and doing the heavy left because she wanted to (that, and my dad was a workaholic). So my brothers saw "the woman will handle it" modeled for them and apparently never crossed their minds that they should put in some effort.[/quote]

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