To think visiting DP’s family doesn’t count as a holiday?

Mum and dad took us kids to Hungary every year for 3 weeks in the summer to visit and stay with family. Dad drove. I’m surprised it isn’t considered a holiday. If that’s the case I went on holiday for the first time aged 20.

The journey to visit his family sounds horrendous. Are they not able to visit you instead? It doesn’t seem fair, especially with a toddler, but you have to make it all the time and they don’t reciprocate. I certainly wouldn’t put myself and toddler through it twice a year, as this will be their turn for. Christmas visit. It’s not fair on you or your toddler and your husband could go alone for summer or them come to you. .

@RhiannonTheFlorist OP, you seem to be the only person who is willing to compromise. It’s great that you and your partner are on the same page when it comes to not staying with your alcoholic father-in-law, but your partner needs to realise that if you’re going to be contributing to the holiday pot, then you need to have more of a say in the holiday itinerary.

First of all, he needs to hire a car so you don’t have to deal with taking the bus etc. Secondly, he needs to be willing to consider to travel with just your daughter especially the years that you’re all traveling as a family in December. Seeing as your alternating, you could tell him that the years that you don’t go in December, you’ll join him in the summer. Therefore the years that you do all go in December, you won’t be joining him in the summer. Make it clear that this is you compromising if he wants you to contribute to the holiday pot that he’s seems to also using to help his family members pay for bills etc.

What’s more, when you go to Budapest or Lake Batalon or wherever, his family does not have to come along if they don’t want to travel the distance. If he hires a car, he can drive to see them. Alternatively, you could rent a villa or just stay in a holiday resort and your partner can drive and pick up family members or visit with you and your daughter or even by himself. You need to tell him that if he refuses to compromise, you’ll stop contributing to the holiday pot because it’s meant to be a family holiday for everyone and not just for him.

It’s also great that your daughter is becoming bilingual so hopefully you can do more regular FaceTime/Zoom calls with your partner’s family members and that would help her and you practice without the pressure of a social situation where you feel you’re stuck and you can’t leave the room because of the awkward stares from the villagers etc. This should be up to your partner to arrange and accommodate and doesn’t need to be a lengthy phone call.

Once you can, try to also get your license so that the trips where you do hire a car, you too will be eventually be able to drive and this will give you both more flexibility. You can also then do more frequent road trips even in the UK for weekend getaways especially when your daughter is quite young.

HE also has a 2 year old child. A child
he would like to take home to Hungary twice a year.

I wouldn’t be able to stand a visit like the one you have described. I wouldn’t call it a holiday at all.

She actually has managed to learn some, according to her posts, but is finding it very difficult - understandably so: it's very difficult for an English speaker to learn a Finn-Ugursk language.

Maybe she did. As I previously said, there might have been a conversation around visits home but There might have been room for it to be more detailed. The point still stands that if he wants to go and visit his family he can go. You could be married to someone and live in Cornwall whilst their relatives are in Inverness. It’s not essential for the family to go every summer. And even worse for the OP she has a two year old child - not school age and they are having to pay a premium to go at Christmas and the summer holidays because somebody else can only go then. Madness.

I don't think they are married.

You have 2 very easy options, either never go and visit his family but never visit yours either. Or every other year instead of spending Christmas with your family go on holiday for Christmas!

As for learning the language; it seems like you don't even want to try! You should be learning alongside your child!

She did play a part in the decision to marry someone from another country. Surely she had some thoughts around this.

You want the OP to have years of consequences for a decision she played no part in when DH decided he didn’t want to live in Hungary? She is not responsible for DH not seeing his family . He is. And he doesn’t seem to be putting his family unit first. He’s placing the guilt he feels onto her.

As someone who has lived in the uk for 30 years I know my husband has to suffer Xmas every year in my home country. I don’t think you are unreasonable wanting a holiday rather than spending it all in Hungary (I presume it’s Hungary) with an alcoholic in law. They should get on a plane and visit you for a change, you can then do a family trip.

I agree these things need to be discussed prior to entering into a relationship and having children. Having said that, things can change when you have children, your parents get elderly etc
I think OP needs to let DP go to Hungary with their DD, but she doesn’t have to go herself.

DD's reaction to me saying that today is Mother's Day in our home country: "I have to text granny". She has a very close relationship to her grandparents, physical vistis aren't the only whay to foster it.

I know people who can't imaging moving away from family, fair enough. But that's not reality for lots of people and if you marry a person not from your home country/town you have to expect that dropping by for a cup of tea/Sunday roast is just not doable.

I have friends with family several hours away from where they live, they see them 1-2x a year. Maybe they chose a looser relationship, maybe it's circumstances. But it's life, it's something you expect to have when your life/partner/career means you are living in a different part of the world.

I also know people who couldn't cope and moved back, again, it's personal choice, but it should be a joint deciision, not one partner dictating it.

I think once a year visit is enough.
My dd is married to a guy from abroad and they plan to visit once a year either at Christmas or Summer. She actually loves his country but its too expensive to go more often. They do keep a travel home allowance ready at all times in case of family emergency and the family abroad will never come here due to financial and health reasons.
My dB has lived abroad for over 30 years and came home every second year while his dc were young and holidayed elsewhere the alternate years. Family members made an effort to visit as much as possible and now his children are reared he comes more often often for short visits. He also budgeted for family emergencies which caused expensive flghts home .
Just go once a year. That is fine. Keep in tough meantime/ send videos etc
And use Google translate . I use it with my interactions with Ukrainian refugees and its like talking after a while.

That’s great that you are happy with this. I personally wouldn’t be. I would be truly miserable if I only saw my family once a year and my children did not have a close relationship with them. If my DH had to sacrifice holidays to other destinations so I could see my family with my children, I would absolutely expect him to. For some people it might not be important which is fine.

Your DP sounds very selfish.

Do you ever put your foot down or does he always get his own way?

@Butterfly123456

I'm assuming that it's not that bad in the village that the OP's partner comes from, but there are still villages in ex-Communist Europe where the roads are dirt tracks and people are living in cottages with earthen floors and no plumbing. (The more mountainous the area, the more likely that is to be the situation.)

The DIL situation that you describe is familiar to me.

No but you have to be realistic that things do change.

Similar to when I moved 600km and a 6 hours drive away from my parents or when DH decided to stay where he went to uni instead of moving back home but still stayed in the same country.

You make decisions and they have consequences. You can't expect that you build a relationship and a family and always put your parents first. That's not how it works.

With modern technology you can keep in touch and talk about events locally via zoom/face time. You don't need to sit in your parent's kitchen to discuss autnie Mary's hip operation.

I am utterly grateful that my parents and my PIL realised and supported us that we won't spend each day we have as annual leave visiting them.

DD is happily embracing her non-UK side at evey opportunity despite only being in our home country maybe once a year and when we decided to choose to spend our family holiday there, it was in a very different area without seeing family at the same time.

It became easier for us once we opted for hotels. I'm afraid that I was economical with the truth with the relatives: I told them that it worked out cheaper for us, that it was an excursion. However, it was a tailored excursion including transfers - much easier for us, given my late husband's health issues.

It was also easier from a bureaucratic point of view - no need to to ask relatives to help us get a Visitor Permit: it's done automatically via the hotel when you travel as a tourist.

It also stopped relatives competing for us to the same extent, though we still had the problem of getting round everyone.

I'm assuming that village life overall is possibly a bit more comfortable for most now - even back in the '80s, I was sharing stories with other folk in the same position of villages without proper WCs - but the other problems remain.

I don't really have a solution, 'cause I'm in a similar situation, but 3x worse (think small town in SA Asia, full of dirt, mosquitoes, stray dogs, harrowing poverty and shady taxi drivers). It takes us 2-3 changes to fly there and then 5-hour car journey / 4-hour taxi/train to end up in a basic village-style mosquito and cocroach-invested bungalow with glassless windows and an open drain just outside in a garden. No country in Europe compares to this (and I'm from EU) and I've been going there every year bar Covid for 15 years, including taking a screaming, 10-month old baby with us. I find it bizzare that you felt scared at a doctor's office in a European country - a language barrier sounds like a convienient excuse. Think about what you would do if you had to spend 2 weeks a year sleeping 4 people on one bed in a hot room under a mosquito net with unfamiliar rodents/insects roaming on the floor, unfamiliar sounds just outside of the windows, being fed with stories about how a neighbour got violently tortured and murdered in a case of fake gold deal that had gone wrong. In a house where the younger DIL is an unpaid servant, spending whole day cooking, cleaning, taking care of her child and doing laundry and never leaves the house (at all). But I did sign up for this when I got married, so here I am. It's just that not many people who are crazy in love envisage what their lives would be like in 10+ years.

Get over yourself !
OP has outlined her reasons for not wanting to go this time around ..
You’ve come along & basically ignored everything she has said & come up with
You’re so selfish , suck it up ! !
She’s not selfish & she doesn’t have to suck it up ..
Sounds miserable to me & I’d be going with my sister !

“ Who made them the boss of you “ 😂😂
brings me back to when I was little ..
I always use to say “ you’re not the boss of me “
Sorry , that has absolutely nothing to do with anything , just felt like saying 😂
Please continue with thread

@TheEveningSun Honestly, I’d ignore their protestations and get an Airbnb, especially as your children get older. I used to endure sleepless nights with us all crammed into my in-laws basement. After one particularly uncomfortable visit, when all four of us were exhausted, I put my foot down.

My IL’s huffed the first time, but now they accept that it’s much easier if we have our own accommodation.

OP just wanted to say I hear your frustrations. My husband is also Hungarian and my family also live abroad in a different European country so trying to fund flights and balance annual leave to see both families equally is tough. We’ve jointly taken the decision to spend Christmas as a family at home and visit out of season the rest of the time to keep costs down. It was much easier when flight prices were lower, I feel your pain. Luckily we both also see the importance of family time together so do a family holiday once every 2 years, maybe this is something you can suggest?