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And this here is yet another example of strife caused by the crude mockery that Westerners have made of marriage by treating it as a contract between two individuals instead of as a bond between two families. What your future in-laws will be like makes up a big part of what your married life will be like unless you jettison those links, but even doing that has a cost on you and your spouse. Hence you need to select on this axis too when deciding on your long term life partner and your failure to do that here has meant unnecessary pain.
Now you might well say that you and your wife got married knowing about this fundamental difference and you accepted this as a negative but still believed the combined package of everything meant marriage was still worth it for you two, in which case fair enough but equally then you can hardly claim to be surprised when your in laws behave in ways concordant with the beliefs you knew they held. If you didn't take this into account and just thought that what extended family are like should have zero bearing on whether you and your wife should get married then you just got burned by having false beliefs about human relationships, no different to a dullard who entered a lion's den at the zoo getting ripped to shreds because he thought they were vegetarian.
And before you say that I have no idea about your relationship dynamic with your wife and thus am unqualified to comment about it know that I am not talking to you at all here. You are irrelevant, it is too late for you, you have already married into this household and now have to live with the consequences. My advice can do nothing for you. I am talking to the other readers here who are yet to make the plunge, they can easily save themselves from a lot of future anguish by just making sure the beliefs of their fiance's family are not too wildly divergent from their own instead of following the modern Western mantra of "you're marrying them, not their family".
For whatever it's worth, I completely understand and agree with your last paragraph.
It may not seem like it, but I agree with this as well. I knew what I was getting into, and I think it would take a "dullard" to pretend otherwise.
I do find the tactic of approaching my father instead of me distasteful. I can handle myself, but putting my parents in the uncomfortable position of speaking for me is inexcusable in my book.
Even from a Christian perspective, it's pretty damn questionable whether they can speak for you in principle. I'm not an expert on Catholic teaching, but I don't think they let you convert people against their will.
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