 Dr. Dale Atkins understands your wedding woes and has the perfect sanity-saving solutions for emotional issues, family questions, and fears about the engagement, wedding planning, and future.
 | I am currently living with my fiancé at his parent’s house, and his mother and I have lots of conflict and friction between us. I desperately want to be friends with her, but it seems impossible. Our wedding is only three months away, and I need some advice. Help! |  |  | You and your future mother-in-law are both going through major changes in your lives, and you just happen to be undergoing them while under the same roof. I don’t know the circumstances that have led you to be living with your fiancé’s parents during such a potentially stressful time, but those conditions would be difficult even for a long-married couple with a strong foundation of love and trust from which to operate. You and your fiancé are about to be married, an experience you are approaching with joy, elation and maybe some trepidation. Parents, too, endure an array of feelings, including sadness at realizing that their child is about to become someone else’s husband, partner and chief concern. In addition, there will be tension surrounding routines and rituals whenever people of differing generations live together. Whatever the source of these frictions, sit down with your fiancé’s mother and simply talk about how you are feeling, then ask for her feelings, concerns and advice. Be sure to stress that you want to work out a good living arrangement for everyone concerned during this transition, and then respect her boundaries.
| |  Dr. Dale Atkins is a professional psychologist and frequent media expert specializing in couple and family relationships. Dr. Dale is also an author with five books to her credit: Sisters; Families and Their Hearing Impaired Children; From the Heart (co-author); I'm OK, You're My Parents; and the most recently published, Wedding Sanity Savers (co-author). Currently living in Connecticut with her husband and dog, Dr. Dale has two grown sons and a private practice in New York City. | |
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