Why should you stay on the good side of your in-laws?

Oh, there are many reasons to stay on their good side...

These relatives can be more powerful than you think. You think those secrets you told your husband or wife will stay between you two? Who knows? It may slip out one day, and before you know it, the mother-in-law who hates you may shrug not-so-innocently when you ask how everyone knows about your undesirable itches or embarrassing incident with your college professor. These things won't exactly cease to come up anymore, either; in-laws are really good at making sure things haunt you forever if they have anything to do about it.

Who knows? They might be a legal sort of family, with a lot of experience with the law and all of its inner-workings. Get into legal trouble? They can make sure you stay in the clink longer than necessary. Getting a divorce? Do you even want to think about what can happen in such a scenario? That's about as ugly as you can get.

What if you want to date the brother or sister? It was already hard enough having to sit through the acceptance dinners for the first kid, and if you get on the parents' bad sides, imagine how hard it would be to slip back into the scene.

If you want to go on one of those family game shows, like "Mother and Daughter Wheel of Fortune," and you don't have that many family members on your side who would do it with you, wouldn't it be great to look to the in-laws for help with that? There's no point in turning to them if they hate you, even if you can win $50,000 and/or a new car (I guess that's "The Price Is Right"...).

In all seriousness, in psychology, they say it can't be that great of a sign for your relationship with your spouse or partner if you can't get along with their parents or other family members. Maybe trying hard to patch things up or create pseudomutuality won't work, but you may want to think about it if you can't seem to make the father-in-law laugh... or smile.

Also, how much would your spouse or partner appreciate your bad relationship with his or her family? That would just mean bad things for you as well.

No matter what, I don't think there should be any reason to be on their bad side. It could be something you could talk out, or if it's not, why are you married to their kid? Don't forget about social learning theory, which states that kids learn a lot from their parents, which affects their current behavior. If there's really love involved, things should work out. Just try to be reasonable and don't find yourself at fault without doing anything about it... and I don't mean taking revenge.