Reply to Do you call your in-laws Mom & Dad?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have avoided directly addressing them for 10+ years now to not have to deal with what I should be calling them. More just make eye contact and say something. It's been working fine![/quote]

OP here.  :lol:  Yeah, I did that for a while as well, plus the Grandmom/Grandpop part (we had kids early in our marriage), until finally going to Mom & Dad.

Question to you - did your in-laws ever expressly ask you to call them anything in particular after you were married?[/quote]

No, it was never clarified. I would not be able to get to Mom and Dad though, so good thing that's not hanging out there. Getting from Mr and Mrs (my new last name) to first names is a hang up too though, and I'm not sure what it's supposed to be now but it's waaay too late to ask.[/quote]

This is why I think going with first names from the jump makes the most senses for all involved. It's how most adults address each other in other settings (work, socially), and it means you don't have to transition to calling someone by a new name in the middle of your relationship. Especially now that people often live together for a while before marriage, or at least date longer.

I can see how it was different when people were more formal in general. For instance, back in the 50s and earlier, it was common to call people in the office by their last names, especially if they were the boss or in any way senior to you (my DH had a holdover from this era that people called Mr. LastName until he retired just a few years ago).  So it made sense to call your boyfriend's or fiancé's parents by their last names, to match the respect level. and people also dated for much shorter periods of time, and had shorter engagements, so you might call your ILs "Mr. and Mrs. Lastname" for a year, maybe two, and then the wedding was a much bigger deal than it is now in terms of family roles (because there was larger stigma against premarital sex, cohabitation, and children out of wedlock, so marriage carried much more weight as a shift in roles and responsibilities) so it would make sense to change what you call each other. Plus people got married younger, so there was a more clear delineation -- if you are 20 and your ILs are 40, they probably feel like "adults" and you feel like a kid, so it makes more sense to call them mom and dad.

None of that is true now. I got married in my mid-30s to a man I'd been living with for 5 years and had already bought a home with. I'd known his parents for years and called them by their first names, as I do 99% of people in the world because that's totally normalized in our culture. I think all of this is why this practice feels super antiquated and awkward for younger generations -- it's a weird holdover from a previous time even though so much has changed around it. It just doesn't make sense anymore.[/quote]

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