Welcome to the awesome marriage podcast, a place for honest conversations and practical advice on how to build an awesome marriage.

I am your podcast producer and co-host, Lindsay Few.

On the show will be our host, Dr. Kim Kimberly.

Dr. Kim is a marriage counselor and has been married for over 50 years.

His passion is to help you strengthen your most intimate relationship.

When you married your spouse, you also married into their family.

In-laws can be a real blessing, but they're not always. So how do we make the best of that

relationship? Do we need to set boundaries or give grace? Well, we get a lot of questions about this topic.

So today, we're talking all about in-law issues. So, Dr. Kim, is it common for couples to struggle

to deal with each other's family of origin?

I think so. I think probably if you lined up 100 couples, there would be more that said yes

than others. And I think for a lot of reasons, none of us grew up in the same home. So there's

going to be differences there. And I think if you grew up in a home that you thought was pretty good,

then you kind of think this is the way it should be. And so you marry somebody and it's different,

then you've got to deal with that. And so there are differences. Parents are different. But when

you're married, you've got to figure out how to be, it needs to be separate from your family of origin. That doesn't

mean you leave them out in the cold, but it does mean that can't be a mess. It needs to be

healthy. It's figuring out how to be still connected, be independent because there's some,

some in-laws can be more controlling than others.

Some are laid back, I think, in our situation, mine were very laid back.

In fact, we were getting back from a honeymoon and like, do they even know we're here?

It's like they were trying to give us space and not be intrusive. And so we kind of worked

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