A couple of years ago, my husband and I made a bold leap and moved our family from the city where we were both born and raised to another city hundreds of miles away. The catalyst was a job that promised a better life for us and our kids and a needed reset from longstanding, exhausting family dynamics. Our parents and siblings still live in our home city, bound up in decades of dysfunctional codependence.
Here’s my question: What ethical obligation do we have to go back for the holidays? We love the life we’ve built here, and travel is especially hard with our neurodiverse school-age children. We made the holiday trip the first two years after the move, but this year we don’t want to. With full-time jobs and young kids, the logistics are daunting.
Complicating things is that our kids are my parents’ only grandchildren; our having left has been devastating for my mom. Travel is physically and financially difficult for my aging parents, who also support my adult siblings — and would probably have to foot the bill if they came here. (For what it’s worth, we do visit our home city each summer, and family members come to us occasionally during the year.)
Time with the extended family isn’t particularly restful or enjoyable for us, and there are better ways for us to spend our limited time off. Do we have a duty to take the kids “home” for the holidays? — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
You do have special obligations to your parents; family ties matter morally. But those obligations are limited by feasibility, fairness and the interests of your household. You don’t have a standing duty to stage-manage a holiday reunion at the expense of your family’s well-being. Love and loyalty can require making room for someone else’s needs; they don’t require self-sacrifice without end, and they don’t override your responsibility to your kids’ well-being and your own.
In short, you’ve made a cogent case against a December trip. Your children already maintain a real connection with their extended family through summer visits and occasional trips at other times. It’s relevant that holiday travel is unusually burdensome for you, especially given your kids’ needs and your work schedules. And while your mother’s disappointment is something to take seriously, it isn’t a trump card. Those ethical “special duties” run in both directions: Parents should also avoid placing recurrent, disproportionate strains on their adult children, particularly when other, workable forms of togetherness exist.
You can tell your parents that you know how meaningful the holidays are to them, and that you’ll miss being there, but that you won’t be traveling this season. Keep the emphasis where it belongs, on the practical constraints. Offer alternatives: a longer summer stay, a January or spring visit, a special video call to exchange gifts, or starting a new tradition at your place if they can come when travel is easier and more affordable. By staying put this December, you’d be choosing a form of family life that you can sustain, showing your parents consideration without burdening your kids or your sanity.
Readers Respond
The previous question was from a reader who felt sexually dissatisfied in his long-term relationship, and hoped to find an ethical way to explore his interest in kink. He wrote:
Since my partner went sober about nine years ago, his libido has gone way down. We have tried many things to meet in the middle, including counseling, scheduling intimacy and role play. These things work briefly, and then we resume a “normal” in which I often feel my desires remain unfulfilled. I have sought refuge in pornography and lots of reading about sex. Amid that, I came upon several forms of kink I was drawn to. … When these desires did not go away, I broached the topic with my partner. He said he was not interested in any of it, but that we could “keep revisiting” the issue. In the past, “keep revisiting” has been code for “never going to happen, I just do not want to disappoint you right now.” Is it ethical for me to seek to revisit the boundaries of the relationship, and seek to move into a consensual nonmonogamous arrangement in which I can seek to explore these kinks? Alternatively, is there an ethical way to frame kink exploration as nonsexual, and therefore not violating monogamy? — Name Withheld
In his response, the Ethicist noted:
Yes, mutual understandings can be revisited, and you can seek to renegotiate the terms of your relationship. The important thing is that any such conversation happens openly and, ideally, in a setting that supports both of you, perhaps with a couples counselor who could help ensure the dialogue doesn’t collapse into defensiveness or shame. What won’t work is to reclassify the sort of kink you have in mind as separate from sex. You’d be pursuing erotic encounters, involving arousal, vulnerability, intimacy. To pretend otherwise would be a semantic dodge, not an ethical solution. You’d be rewriting the relationship’s rules on your own. Your relationship is unlikely to be helped, of course, if your sexual frustration curdles into resentment — a retreat into sour semi-celibacy. If that’s what looming, there’s a good case for speaking frankly about what you want and what your partner can or cannot give, and seeing whether the two of you can agree on new terms and boundaries.
(Reread the full question and answer here.)
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I’m an older gay man. I’ve been the “dom” in previous relationships and I don’t mind, even though frankly I’d rather just make love and then cuddle. Giving your partner what he or she needs is part of a relationship. I think the writer’s partner is wrong to ignore his loved one’s needs, even if it’s not his thing. His indifference may come back to haunt him. — Douglas
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I know firsthand the frustration of not feeling sexually fulfilled. My husband has had erectile dysfunction since we got together 30 years ago. Counseling and medical help didn’t change his condition. Today, all my resentment is far gone. My husband has been an amazing support to me as I’ve gone through health problems. Even more important, we lived with and cared for my ailing father, who required help with everything. My husband took those tasks on, even though it was often unpleasant. Seeing him take such selfless care of both of us totally changed my perspective on my marriage. What an amazing catch. I’m glad I didn’t let the sexual desert cause me to bail. There’s always self-pleasure. — Karen
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The guy who is simultaneously celebrating his 12-year, plain-vanilla relationship and yearning for some nebulous “kink” should grow up. As adults, we can control our libidos. This guy wants to get some stuff on the side, and I don’t think that talking about it with that poor partner is the answer to anything. — Joan
The post Do We Have to Spend the Holidays With My Parents? appeared first on New York Times.
