How to survive a holiday with your in-laws: a marital counsellor offers tips

More than three-quarters of Hongkongers have argued with their in-laws or spouse on a shared holiday, a survey found

Women find it harder to travel with in-laws, but Asian women are better at coping than Western women

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Could you survive a holiday with your in-laws? A marital expert says the best thing a man can do to have good relations with his wife and mother is to gently let his mother know that his wife is now his priority. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:00am, 6 Jul 2019Updated: 5:34pm, 7 Jul 2019

If the thought of travelling with your own parents sounds like a recipe for stress, try doing it with your spouse’s. A whole week of being on your best behaviour while supposedly having a good time is bound to test even the saintliest among us. It did for Karen.

Karen – not her real name – was two years into her marriage when her husband suggested they holiday with his elderly parents. She had been brought up as a good Hong Kong girl and knew all about filial piety, but it was still tougher than she had imagined.

“I did it for him. It would have been OK if he’d recognised that I was having a terrible time, that it was a sacrifice I was willing to make for him – but he could not see it,” she says. “Everything was about what his mother wanted to do. We had our first ever real row on that trip.”

Karen is not alone. A recent survey of 1,000 Hongkongers by Skyscanner found that more than half had travelled with their in-laws. Among that group, more than three quarters (76 per cent) of them had argued with their other half or even their in-laws because of the trip.

Travelling with in-laws has one definite advantage: free babysitters. Photo: Alamy

The study revealed that the top reasons for these fights were the difference in living and eating habits (26 per cent), followed by different itinerary expectations (23 per cent) and the convenience of visiting planned attractions (17 per cent).