In-Laws: Round One

If the holidays are good for anything, they are great for getting to know your in-laws. With Thanksgiving in the bag, and Christmas right around the corner it's important to have a game plan. Men's Health has a great article about how to seduce your in-laws for the holidays. Here are just a few:

1. Be an anthropologist.

Think of her team as a tribe and of yourself as a student of a foreign culture. You aren't put off by the oddness of their practices; on the contrary, you're intrigued. Every family, including the crew you come from, is inspired or enslaved by a unique set of customs, myths, memories (some false, some true), jokes, superstitions, nicknames, hatreds, and affections. To figure out how bizarre your in-laws are is good sport -- if you like shooting fish in a barrel. If you prefer to test yourself, try figuring out the source of their power, how they were steward to the woman who lured you into their web.

2. Decide to be devoted.

Why use your wit to distance yourself from their dysfunction, when, on your wedding day, it became your dysfunction? Embrace it. No, you don't have to agree that Italian-Americans are, for some reason, the best people on the planet or that all conservatives should be kidnapped and reprogrammed to admire Ted Kennedy. Teammates can agree to disagree. And make no mistake: You're teammates now.

3. Laugh at their jokes.

No male belief is more inhibiting to relationships than our cowboy notion that real men always say what they mean and mean what they say, and aren't we just the most straight-up, deal-with-it gender you've ever seen. Yikes! Building relationships requires insincerity. Particularly in the early in-law days, you have to do some sycophantic spadework, say things you don't mean as a way of signaling respect, genuflecting to the more mature culture. Don't worry, you won't break into a million pieces if you laugh at a dumb family joke. Moreover, if you start acting as though you enjoy their humor and cherish their tales, you may actually start enjoying their humor and cherishing their tales. Often, acts of affiliation lead to feelings of affiliation.

4. Remember your gender.

Don't fall for the myth that marriage is gender free. A good son-in-law doesn't let his in-laws believe that their daughter ever does any of the following: shovel snow, pick up the kids at the airport, mow the lawn, or make the 10 p.m. run for emergency pizza. Of course, she's perfectly capable of all of the above. Doesn't matter. Allow your in-laws the fantasy that your physical strength is actually an asset to their daughter, that your presence in her life offers her protection from some of the world's dangers, including mower blades, traffic at O'Hare, and being in parking lots after dark. You're her husband. Handle that stuff. Or at least pretend to.

Read the whole article here.