“My husband tells his mother everything” ... Why a woman married for 20 years faced a wave of criticism after opening up

[Financial News] A woman who has been married for 20 years said she was stressed because her husband relayed details of their arguments to his mother. But after revealing that she, too, told her own mother every time she fought with her husband, she was criticized by online users for having a double standard.
On the 23rd, a woman posted on an online community that she had been lectured repeatedly over the past 20 years because her husband passed along conversations between the couple to his mother.
According to A, her recent conflict with her husband stemmed from plans for a weekend fishing trip. When he said he was going fishing with friends, A asked him to put it off by just one week because an information session at their child’s academy was scheduled.
Her husband agreed to her request, but then went into a room and called someone. A said, “My husband said he understood, then went into a room and talked to someone on the phone for a while. But the next morning, my mother-in-law called me.”
The person her husband had called was his mother. A said her mother-in-law had asked her to make sure her son could rest, and recalled, “She took his side, saying, ‘My son has been having a hard time lately, so let him catch his breath over the weekend.’ This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Throughout our 20 years of marriage, without fail, my mother-in-law would call the day after my husband and I had an argument.”
A said her husband gave his mother detailed accounts of their conversations. “She knows everything I said, without missing a single word,” A said, adding that she had once told her husband she was tired of married life, only to be summoned by her mother-in-law and lectured.
At the time, her mother-in-law reportedly scolded A, saying, “You shouldn’t throw around the word ‘tired’ so casually.” A said, “I was so embarrassed I could hardly bear it. I asked my husband several times to resolve between the two of us anything that happened between us as a couple, but he wouldn’t hear of it, saying, ‘What’s wrong with telling Mom?’”
Her mother-in-law did not always take her husband’s side. She sometimes reprimanded her son when he had done something wrong, but A said she disliked the fact that every conversation between the couple was passed on to her mother-in-law.
However, A had also been telling her own mother in detail about her conflicts with her husband. She admitted, “I talk to my mom every day. I tend to tell her everything—what my husband did that day and what he said that hurt my feelings.” Still, she insisted there was a difference between her behavior and her husband’s, saying, “But that’s just chatting with my mom. It’s not the same as telling her absolutely everything, the way my husband does.”
A’s own mother had also directly brought up things she had heard from her daughter with her son-in-law. For example, she would tell him, “Kim, you should cut back on drinking. Our daughter worries about you a lot and doesn’t like it.”
A said she could not regard the two mothers’ actions as the same. “My mother-in-law is just lecturing me, her daughter-in-law, directly. My mom says those things because she worries about her son-in-law,” she said. “We’ve been married for 20 years, but it still seems that, to my husband, his own mother—my mother-in-law—comes before me. I don’t even expect things to change anymore.”
But online users who read her account largely criticized A’s attitude. They said she took issue with her husband telling his mother about their marital problems while believing it was fine for her to tell her own mother the same things.
Some comments criticized A, saying, “How is it okay for her to do it but not for her husband and mother-in-law? What kind of double standard is that?” and “The two of them are made for each other. I hope they stay together for the rest of their lives.”


[email protected] Han Seung-gon Reporter