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Notes -
It's so bizarre for me to see... Being close with your marital family lampooned as fruity new age emotional stuff, and the celebrated trad option is to be so sexually repressed as to poison family relations.
Hanging out with and going into business with your in laws is trad and Lindy. Anthropologists across primitive tribes have found a common answer to why incest is bad to be "Who would I go hunting with if I didn't have in laws?"
@TheDag two things
Your FiL wants you to be morally staid. My FiL drinks like a fish, he prefers I have one beer after he badgers me repeatedly to do so.
Get his help with something. Ask his advice on something. Take him to home Depot to help you pick out cabinets or paint or whatever, get him to help you shop for a car, ask his advice on a home improvement project, whatever as the case may be. Show him that you know what he's good at, respect him for it, and that he still has a role to play in your lives going forward.
Hah thank you for this, I was also confused. The whole point of a traditional marriage is to bind the two families, and @naraburns aren't those scriptures referring to if your family denies the truth of the Lord? Not just like, in general?
I am very much not a theologian, but a plain reading of the New Testament verse (as well as the Genesis verse it derives from) appears to suggest that a family unit is comprised of a husband and wife plus children--but the children are expected to eventually grow up and leave to form their own families, which become their first priority.
The Psalm is less clear to me, maybe because Christians gloss it with the bride-and-bridegroom thing that the New Testament does with Christ and the Church. But on a plain reading, the Psalm again seems to suggest that when the bride goes to marry the king, she's supposed to focus all her energies on him instead of on her family, because the king is super cool. Assuming the psalmist is David, though, it kinda reads like he's being a judge in his own cause...
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Well, the Psalmist wrote,
And the New Testament gives similar advice to men:
My answer was intentionally lighthearted and broad, as the question seemed lighthearted ("Grillin'? Fishing?") and broad. A more serious answer might be a boring "do whatever you want, either it will work or it won't, you can't force a relationship with anyone, not even with in-laws." Or maybe an even more boring "have you asked your father-in-law?"
But while I am sure that being close with your in-laws is "trad" sometimes, it's at least as often very much not.
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