Curtailing continuing conflict with your mother-in-law

July 11, 2022

Do our mothers-in-law really dislike us? And if they don’t like us, why not? The actual reasons for this common conflict are somewhat surprising and likely stem from our evolutionary history, reports Psychology Today.

Number one among the major reasons for dislike and conflict is that adult children are looking for different traits in a spouse than their parents would prefer: While we value traits such as physical attractiveness, an exciting personality, or a good sense of humor in our partners; our parents are more likely to value characteristics such as a good family background, sound financial prospects, or a similar religious or ethnic background.

Because of these different preferences, we may choose mates for ourselves whom our parents would not have chosen for us. This may lead to an initial dislike on the part of our in-laws, which can be difficult to overcome.

Number two maybe hard to believe—but the parents may find a potential spouse too attractive for their tastes. Indeed, some of the largest conflicts in mate preferences between adult children and their parents occur on traits associated with physical attractiveness.

Indeed, according to evolutionary theory, we value those traits in a mate because we want to secure good genes for our future offspring. Our parents, however, may have good reasons to object to physically attractive partners. Based on evolutionary theory, women who are more attractive than their male partners think more about leaving their relationship and show more interest in alternative partners; while men who are more attractive may be less inclined to invest in or care for future offspring.

Third—and there is little that a potential partner can do about this—mothers of men may unconsciously discourage long-term relationships. If you were to ask a mother if she wants a stable, secure, long-term relationship for her son, she would say yes. But for men, monogamous, long-term relationships may not have been desirable during most of their evolutionary history. According to evolutionary theory, men and women have differing optimal mating strategies to ensure that their genes are perpetuated through future generations.

Strictly evolutionarily speaking, a man’s best mating strategy may be a series of short-term relationships with different women in order to ensure that his genes will be passed on. However, women would not necessarily benefit from the same strategy; a woman’s best strategy may be to find a mate who will provide for her over the long term and help to raise and care for future offspring. The interference of a mother-in-law in her son and daughter-in-law’s relationship may reflect a mother’s unconscious desire to help her son “spread his seed.”

However, a mother-in-law to a daughter and son-in-law should try to facilitate the marriage of her daughter so that her son-in-law will remain committed over the long term. In fact, mothers-in-law rate their relationships with their sons-in-law more favorably than their relationships with their daughters-in-law. Moreover, some interference by mothers-in-law may be intended to weaken their sons’ marriages.

Fourth is the fact that mothers and daughters-in-law may find themselves in direct competition for resources and attention. Historical evidence suggests that when there were multiple women within a family reproducing at the same time, their offspring were less likely to survive—perhaps due to a fixed amount of food being divided among more relatives.

Today, this type of conflict is rare, but mothers-in-law still might perceive that they are competing with their daughters-in-law for the time and attention of their sons. Some research suggests that older women are more likely to experience neglect due to poor relationships with their daughters-in-law, and mothers-in-law may worry that they will be excluded by their child and his/her new partner.

So how is a newlywed supposed to go about reducing conflict? Some advise that the best way to deal with these conflicts is to try to convince your in-laws that you are a good mate for their child by showing how much you care for your spouse.

Additionally, if you are not yet married, more one-on-one contact with your future in-laws prior to your marriage may facilitate better relationships after the wedding.

However, if in-law conflict persists, you must put your marriage first: Individuals who feel supported by their spouses in their conflicts with their in-laws experience more satisfying marriages.

Research contact: @PsychToday

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast