Relationships between In-laws
The practice of “in-law avoidance” has been of considerable interest to anthropologists and refers to the observation that a spouse’s parents, especially mothers-in-law, are often treated with respect, circumspection, and even hostility. This seems particularly prevalent where couples live in close proximity to the parents-inlaw. One explanation for this phenomenon concerns avoidance of sexual, economic, and social exploitation that might occur among in-laws. In our framework, this practice might also be partly interpreted in terms of a dialectic process of privacy regulation. That is, because the relationship between in-laws is imposed by virture of a marriage, and because in-laws often have close and potentially emotion-laden contacts, one might expect to find compensatory mechanisms permitting them to reduce and/or defuse their contacts.