Anna can’t exactly pinpoint when her relationship with her sister-in-law started to sour. Rather, it was a slow unraveling.

When the two met over 20 years ago through their now-husbands, who are brothers, Anna actually preferred spending time with her future sister-in-law. “We would hang out all the time,” says Anna, who is being referred to by her middle name so she can speak freely about her family. “I would get through being with him just to hang out with her.”

Anna and her sister-in-law also had a common enemy: their husbands’ parents. At family gatherings, they’d steal away with a glass of wine and whisper, “Can you believe they said that?” The women could compare notes about their mother-in-law’s latest insult or how their father-in-law constantly belittled his wife.

Unlike Anna, 47, who largely kept her concerns to herself, her sister-in-law was vocal about her dislike for their in-laws. This rubbed Anna’s husband the wrong way and ultimately drove a wedge between the two families.

Now, they live an hour away and only see each other a handful of times a year. And when they do, it’s awkward, Anna says. Her kids are no longer close with their cousins. Whenever Anna’s sister-in-law invites her family on trips to amusement parks, they decline but end up going anyway — without them — and then lying about why they couldn’t coordinate plans.

“I just hate the dishonesty,” Anna says. “The worst part for me is pretending everything is fine when clearly everybody in the room knows it’s not fine.”

The relationship one has with their in-laws can be fraught and perplexing, friendly and intimate, polite and distant.

The relationship one has with their in-laws can be fraught and perplexing, friendly and intimate, polite and distant. They’re not the people you’ve chosen to bind yourself to, but you’re still inextricably linked as long as you’re with your partner. In-laws enjoy all the trappings and status of family, but aren’t quite. Spending time with them can feel obligatory and not totally enjoyable. At the same time, there are no clearly defined expectations for what in-law relationships should look like, beyond the stereotypes.

So what do you owe your partner’s families of origin? They may not be your family, but they’re probably going to be in your life in some form or fashion. They might never be a proxy for your own mother or sibling, but that doesn’t mean they can’t come close.

The in-law stereotype

As long as people have married, they have inherited their spouse’s family. For centuries, parents aimed to pair their children based on the reputation, power, and wealth of a neighboring family, to create alliances through marriage. In many cultures worldwide, newlyweds typically moved in or near the husband’s family. “The aim of marriage was to acquire useful in-laws or gain political or economic advantage,” writes Stephanie Coontz in the 2005 book Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. By the 1920s, Coontz writes, “marital privacy was more important than adults’ ties with their parents” and, as a result, the number of couples who lived with their parents dropped precipitously over the first half of the 20th century.

As couples established themselves as independent entities, in-laws — especially mothers-in-law — came to be seen as prying interlopers, as evidenced in the 1954 book In Laws, Pro & Con. “Many a mother-in-law sounds baffled, bewildered, and........

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