The grief of the in-laws after a divorce

This one is genuinely understudied. Nobody has published a longitudinal study on what it does to a person to lose a son- or daughter-in-law they had loved for twenty years. The peer-reviewed literature is mostly absent. The lived experience is everywhere. When a marriage ends, the in-laws are told, often without anyone saying it directly, to take a side. Most do. The side is almost always blood. This is not a betrayal; it is a default. But it means the former in-law, who may have been their actual confidante, their Thanksgiving co-host, their grandchild's other-side-of-the-table for two decades, is now in the cold without a casserole. If you are the parent of a child who is divorcing: do not cut your former in-law off because of loyalty. The loyalty is automatic. It does not require active cruelty. Call her on her birthday. Send a Christmas card to her parents. Tell your child this is what you are doing. Your child will be furious for about a year. Your child will be grateful by year three. If you are the former in-law: do not wait for them to call. Call them. Tell them you know they have to take a side. Tell them you do not require a side. Tell them you are happy to receive a Christmas card and that is the whole ask. People surprise you. Most people, given a clear small ask, will meet it. Most people will not invent the ask themselves. There is no formal name for this kind of grief. There should be. Until there is one, call it what it is — the grief of having been in a family you no longer have access to — and grieve it with the same weight you would give a death. The structural mechanism of this loss is worth examining in some detail, because the mechanism is not what most participants assume during the process. The mechanism is not, primarily, anyone's deliberate decision to exclude the former in-law. The mechanism is the operation of family loyalty inside an institution that was never designed to handle divorce. Families of origin function as small social systems. The systems have rules, mostly unspoken, about who is included and how. The rules accommodate marriage. The rules do not accommodate divorce, because divorce was not, in the cultural moment when most family systems were established, the expected outcome of marriage. The rules default, when divorce occurs, to the blood-relative side. The default is not deliberate. The default is what happens when the system encounters a situation it does not have explicit rules for. What this means, in practice, for the former in-law. The Thanksgiving invitation does not arrive. The Christmas card does not arrive. The birthday call does not happen. None of these are decisions anyone has explicitly made. Each is the result of the default. The default sounds like, in the parent-in-law's internal narrative, 'I don't want to make it weird' or 'I should probably let some time pass' or 'I'm not sure what's appropriate.' Each of these is a rationalization for the absence of contact. The rationalization is not a lie. The rationalization is the default in language form. The former in-law experiences the absence as an active withdrawal. The former in-law does not, in most cases, see the operation of the default. The former in-law sees, instead, the specific people they spent twenty years with deciding to remove access. The experience is of being discarded. The experience is real. The experience is also, structurally, an artifact of a system that was not designed to handle the situation. The remedy for the structural default is the deliberate interruption of it. Both sides can perform the interruption. The former in-law's parents-in-law can decide, explicitly, to continue some form of relationship. The decision has to be explicit, because the default will, in the absence of the explicit decision, produce the silence. The decision can be small. A birthday call. A Christmas card. A biannual lunch. The size is not important. The existence is important. The existence signals that the family system has, deliberately, made room for a new category of relationship that the default did not contain. The former in-law can also perform the interruption. The phone call can be initiated from the former in-law's side. The card can be sent. The lunch can be proposed. The proposal has to be small enough that the recipient can accept without the acceptance feeling like a betrayal of the blood-relative side. 'Would you like to have a coffee in March' is a small enough proposal that most recipients can accept it. 'Would you like to come for Thanksgiving' is too large at this stage and will, in most cases, produce the awkward refusal that ends the attempted interruption. The work, on both sides, requires explicit acknowledgment of the new configuration. 'I know you have to prioritize your daughter. I am not asking you to choose. I am asking only for a small form of continued contact, on whatever terms you are comfortable with.' The sentence is long. The sentence is also the specific language that makes the request acceptable to the recipient. The request without the framing is more demanding, and the increased demand is what produces the refusal. Children, when they are part of the divorce, complicate the picture. Grandparents who maintain contact with the former in-law often do so partly to maintain access to the grandchildren. The motivation is not deceptive. The motivation is honest, but the dual purpose can produce complications if the former in-law interprets the contact as primarily about the grandchildren rather than about the relationship itself. The clarifying move, on the grandparents' side, is to indicate that the contact has two purposes and that both are valued. The former in-law can then respond on the basis of the dual purpose rather than on the basis of a misread single purpose. Some in-law relationships survive divorce well. The survival is not spectacular. The survival is the small continued contact, across the years, that preserves the relationship at a lower frequency than during the marriage but at a higher frequency than the default. The survival produces, over years, a specific category of relationship that English does not have a word for. The relationship is not in-law. The relationship is not stranger. The relationship is something in between, warm and limited, real and small, preserved by deliberate interruption of the default. Call her on her birthday. Send the Christmas card. Have the March coffee. The small continued contact is the specific mechanism that interrupts the default. The interruption is the preservation of the relationship. The relationship, preserved, is what the literature is not documenting but what the people involved are, in their own small daily ways, actually doing.