Ask Amy: Daughter-in-law doesn’t want to forgive adultery
What would you recommend?
— Unforgiving?
Dear Unforgiving?: People can be stupid, unethical, dishonest, and hurtful. In a long marriage, partners sometimes betray one another, and demonstrate that they are flawed partners and parents.
Because of your personal history, you set great store on your in-laws to be the perfect parents that you never had. Unfortunately, they turned out to be the imperfect parents that many of us have.
Among the mistakes they made were to involve their son as a go-between in their marriage. They also seem to be insisting that you erase your memory bank and carry on as if this family drama had never happened.
Ideally, because they involved you in the problem, they would also involve you in the solution by telling you: “We are working out our problems within the marriage. We hope that you will hang in there with us while we do that.”
The way for you to recover from this is not to drink a cup of “instant forgiveness,” but to explore your own capacity for forgiveness. As ever, true forgiveness would benefit you more than them.
I think it is natural and normal — and shows good judgment — to go through a period of deep skepticism while you do that, but your goal should be to arrive at a nuanced and mature understanding.
Dear Amy: After a Little League baseball game, my wife and I took our daughter’s family of five to a new mid-scale restaurant for lunch.
With three pre-teens, we were understandably seated in a larger adjoining room.
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