In-law relationships take years to build, so you’d expect they wouldn’t unravel in just a moment—or even a few. But for one Mumsnet forum user, a once-warm bond with her son’s wife has become brittle and cold.

In a heartfelt post, the lady explained that the bad signs started to appear around the birth of her first grandchild. But she didn’t want to escalate things and hoped they would subside. They didn’t.

Now, the rare visits are dominated by dismissive language and there’s no apparent interest from the daughter-in-law to rectify the situation. So she’s asking the internet if she herself should initiate it.

A good mother- and daughter-in-law relationship benefits the whole family

Image credits: Teona Swift / Pexels (not the actual photo)

But this woman and her son’s wife have had a falling out and she doesn’t even understand why

Image credits: Getty Images / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)

Image credits: helpamilout

Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)

The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law dynamic has a lot of pre-programmed challenges

Part of why in-law relationships can be so tricky is the fact that there is no universal manual for them.

Some partly blame the historical formation of heterosexual family structures for the trope of the meddling mother-in-law.

In some patrilineal societies, parents choose who their child marries, and once married, the daughter-in-law moves in with her husband’s family.

As the senior woman of the household in these arrangements, the mother-in-law is in charge of the domestic duties and gains higher social status and decision-making authority over her daughter-in-law.

“It’s a precarious environment because the new wife is separated from their family of origin and those who may be more protective of her,” says Dr. Gretchen Perry, who spent 25 years in social services work with vulnerable individuals and families, and currently is researching non-parental caregivers.

“Depending on the nature of that circumstance, it can be a difficult, controlling environment, with a lot of conflict.” So again, the omnipresent trope of the meddling mother-in-law is partly a hangover from this setup, where a daughter-in-law is under the thumb of a matriarch.

Today, these kinds of living arrangements are far less common, but according to statistics, a woman and her mother-in-law are more likely to clash than male members of the family.

Psychologist Dr. Terri Apter, who conducted more than two decades of research and summarized it in her book What Do You Want from Me?: Learning to Get Along with In-Laws, found that 60% of women admitted that the relationship with their female in-laws caused them long-term unhappiness and stress. Moreover, two-thirds of daughters-in-law felt that their husband’s mother frequently exhibited jealous, maternal love towards their son. 75% of couples reported having problems with an in-law, but only 15% of mother-in-law/son-in-law relationships were described as tense.

It’s difficult to know what the problem in this particular case is when the author of the post herself doesn’t, but hopefully, she and her daughter-in-law will find a way to get past it.

As people reacted to the story, its author provided them with more information

There were a lot of opinions and advice in the replies

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