|
Posted by: Kim_Hamilton on 11/12/2007 11:56 PM
Updated by: thepinetree on 01/03/2008 09:12 AM
Expires: 01/01/2012 12:00 AM
:
Thoughts on Bringing Your New Love Home for Holidays~By Karen Wildwood
With the close of summer and the coming of fall, the gateway to the holidays has run past us and with that annual change, a different sort of traveling comes along too. Summertime travel is for family vacations to such wonderful locations as Disneyland or Hawaii with most of staying in the mindset that travel is for those summertime days where we can rest, relax and just recharge. But there’s just as much traveling during the holidays when we go to see family, witness the packed airports the day before Thanksgiving, a couple of days before Christmas and right around New Year’s....
Visiting family for the holidays is always a blessing but can be fraught with possible pitfalls and emotional landmines. After all, the old saying goes, ‘you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family’. One of the great benefits of this is that your family accepts you just how you are, with the accompanying knowledge that they really do know you just as you are too. But, that doesn’t relieve the need to limit visits with Great Uncle Harry to those minimal hours at the holiday dinner table and the aftermath of the holiday feast which includes coffee and dessert in the sitting room.
In these situations the big holiday question is not just who gets to sit next to Great Uncle Harry and hear all of his bodily, and not so bodily, tales of woe but also the how of introducing a new significant other into the festivities. Anytime you bring a new person into a relatively static mix, it’s not always an easy navigation both for the new person and the family member they are attached too.
There is an unavoidable nervousness that accompanies spending a holiday in a co-joined state for the first time. This is made somewhat worse by your own family members because you actually know them and how they are capable, and not so capable of, behaving.
Usually by the time you’ve decided the relationship is stable enough to bring your new guy or gal to the holiday party, they’ve already met at least one or two members of your family. Hopefully these people like your new significant other because they pave the way for the both of you in the family dynamic, making it as smooth as a Roman Road or as rocky and difficult as an uphill climb of a foothill mountain. This is because they get the word out about your new partner before you even step through the door.
Families talk. This is an unavoidable fact of life. Add to this the brutal reality that they are, well, brutally honest in their own fashion, and, you have an interesting situation before you even walk through the door. This family foreknowledge may, or may not, lead to an uncomfortable silence and watchfulness when you do actually walk through the door. Or, the flipside of that a situation is one in which everyone, although watchful, is actually happy to see you and meet your new love.
Before you bring someone to the get together, you need to decide if you really have a relationship that is going to be long lasting and worth introducing into the family dynamic. If all you’re doing is trying to take a date to the family party, you’re better off going on your own. One of the reasons for this is if the family really likes them and you don’t, you’ll be fielding questions of ‘what happened to that wonderful person you were dating?’ for the next few years. The other is that if you don’t know the person well enough to bring them to a holiday family party, you may end up embarrassing yourself when they behave in ways that you yourself never imagined they would. Picture them taking their shoe off after dinner so they can massage their foot and the accompanying looks of disgust your family will try hard to suppress.
The benefit to actually being in a relationship that is working well for you is that typically if you are in a situation that is working well, and the person is a good fit for you, then they will fit in with your family too. After all, birds of a feather flock together. It just takes awhile for the ‘getting to know each others’ to get done. This is because if you are in a good relationship and are happy, then your family is going to be happy for you and accept your new other, quirks and all. This is especially true if you’re a resingle because your family has already seen you in a marriage or long-term relationship that hasn’t worked.
So, what do you do to make the way a little easier for your new love? Simple, tell them about each family member, including how they are related, what their personalities are like and how they fit into the family dynamic. And make sure that, even though they are the new kid on the block and you, along with your family, feel like a little hazing may be in order, whatever you do don’t seat them next to Great Uncle Harry. Leave that particular treat for next year.
|
| Comments |
| The comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for its content. We value free speech but remember this is a public forum and we hope that people would use common sense and decency. If you see an offensive comment please email us at news@thepinetree.net
|
|
|
