How do people deal with manipulative/controlling in laws? I truly love my wife and we always thought our relationship with her parents would change after marriage and now 4 years later with a kid on the way, it hasn’t. They feel the need to make passive/aggressive comments that they basically think I’m a slave driver for insisting that she has her own career and keep working. They legitimately cannot believe she wants to be more than a stay at home mom. Frustrated to the point of depression.

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Hows your wife’s relationship with her parents? Why doesn’t she stand up to them? Do you see them often?

I would probably make passive aggressive comments back after that much time lol

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Oh. Yeah. Not the same, but I’m the lazy suck on my husband’s great potential life. Why did he choose me and not someone more like them? Oh, he’ll see his error soon enough!
...20 years later we are at detente.
She has stopped passive aggressive comments, as I have never, and I mean never responded to anything she said with anything but a shrug or a nod-and-smile or an emotionless statement of fact. I gave her no air and is suffocated her attempts to get under my skin.
My spouse was rarely aware of the digs said under her breath or when he wasn’t in the room (I’m also incredibly good at not being in a room alone with them at this point.). But, and here’s your hope: once the kid came along and they made a single snide comment about our parenting? He was DONE. Told them straight out that they had a thread to our lives and that kid - and they’d cut it right quick with that kind of nonsense.

They didn’t shape up, but did simmer down and now they barely have a relationship with me of the kid and are woe-is-us. To which I nod and smile or leave the room. When I see them 2x a year when they live 1/4 mile away.

People can only take what you give them. Give them no power. Give them no attention or time.

likesmart

Is "smiling-nodding-shrugging-changing the topic" an option?
I'd personally use a more direct approach and reiterate my policy on unsolicited opinions, but there are some people who are great at ignoring (or pretending to ignore) what is being said and doing things their way.

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