I don’t get along with my sister-in-law. Should I try to address the dynamic?

I’m struggling with a dynamic with my sister-in-law. We’re not a natural fit personality-wise, and I’ve tried to be mindful of that. At times I wonder whether she might be jealous of the life I have with her brother and our children. I often encourage my husband to spend time with her without me, because she doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy me being there. As a result, we now mostly see each other at family gatherings, which happen about once a month.

There’s a recurring pattern where she corrects me quite sharply, with an impatience that often feels disproportionate or plain mean. She might snap while I am talking to her parents (with whom I have a good relationship), laugh at how I pronounce a placename, or dismiss a question as though it’s too stupid to answer. These interactions are quick and barely noticeable to anyone else, although my daughter and husband have both observed and agreed it was pretty mean.

I’m unsure how to interpret this behaviour. More importantly, I don’t know what I owe – to myself, to her, and to the wider family in terms of responding.

Is this best addressed directly, even at the risk of creating awkwardness? At what point does tolerating this kind of interaction become a failure to stand up for myself? And might there be a cost in not trying to improve a relationship that could otherwise be supportive as we navigate the more ordinary trials of family life – ageing parents, illness and difficult decisions?

Eleanor says: The in-law relationship can be such an unstable combination: you’re simultaneously meant to be part of a family and yet also a guest outside it. There can be all the expectation that you’ll be close – spend holidays together, get on well, share major celebrations and traumas – without the things that tend to make that closeness possible. You probably didn’t grow up together, you don’t spend enough time together to really gain an accurate knowledge of what a person is like and you’re too polite to argue in ways that can lead to honest understanding.

So when conflict appears, you can wind up in the bind you’re in now: am I supposed to approach this the way I would with close family? Or the way I would as a polite guest?

As you say, the exact diagnosis for why she does this probably matters less than what to do about it. You might be right that she’s jealous. Or perhaps she feels insecure. People who are a bit afraid of failing are often gifted at painting those failings on to others. Maybe ostentatiously finding ways to point out that you don’t “get it” (whatever it is) is her way of anxiously insisting that she does get it. Or she could just plain not like you. You could have trodden on her toes accidentally, who knows.

I think your question about what to do depends on how far upstream you want your solution to be. Are you mainly hurt by the way she treats you? Or are you mainly hurt by the way she sees you?

You might primarily care about how she behaves: “She can believe what she wants about me, I just don’t know whether to keep allowing these barbs.” Alternatively, you might primarily care about what these barbs reveal of how she sees you: “She shouldn’t think I’m foolish and small.”

One is about changing her behaviour. The other is about changing her mind. I think your strategy going forward will depend on which you care most about.

If what you want most is the behaviour to change, you can get that by making it too socially expensive to treat you like this, or by having an awkward conversation asking her to stop. The catch is, those ways of changing her behaviour might only cement her view of you. If she resents your presence in the family or has an imaginary, disagreeable version of you, a social sanction or confronting conversation might seem to confirm things for her – even if she does pull her head in at the dinner table.

This is the annoying trade-off at the heart of all kinds of conflicts: you can very effectively produce certain behavioural changes in others, if you don’t mind paying a cost in how they see you.

If instead you most want to improve the way she seems to think of you, that might have to happen one-on-one. Corrections and snaps like this are often for the benefit of an audience, such that when the audience goes away so too does the snapping. A dynamic between the two of you might be quite different from the things she tries to prove in front of your husband or your kids.

Your way forward depends on what you most want this relationship to be. Do you want it to feel like family – sometimes awkward, sometimes intense, but aimed at really knowing each other? Or would you be content if you could at least get the treatment you’d expect for any other guest?

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