Anyone else's PIL tell the SAME stories all the time

[avocuddl]

Even when I say, oh yes you've told this one before, they'll continue to retell the bloody anecdote that wasn't witty, funny or interesting the first time.

I think I need to work on my fake interested face and fake laugh.

It’s the way the stories are told as if it’s the first time that drives me crazy! I’m getting irritated even thinking about some of the stories that are then delivered as parenting advice

My DGM does this, same stories every time I see her.

Tales about people I don't know and places I've never been from when she was growing up. She's done it ever since I remember, so not due to her age then, although she's in her 90s now.

Over the last 10 years or so though the stories have been morphing into something odd, and getting more and more bizarre with each telling.

And yet another slew of ageist material, after all young people are never boring! My friends span a range of age groups; my older friends are retired doctors doing community work, practicing artists, doing years out on VSO, running businesses, writing plays, publishing history/novels, running local organic co-ops. Friends in their 70s just left for a month-long tour of India. If a lot of you know older people who are boring perhaps they always were, alternatively if their lives are restricted what are you doing to make them more interesting? I have friends in Age UK who regularly do community work to help isolated, older people participate more in the wider world, what are you doing?

I recently had to meet some people in their 20s who spent ages talking about the minutiae of their new kitchen now that was pretty fucking boring.

At the risk of being boring, other posters have already said that repeated monologues are not restricted to the elderly. Examples have been given of all ages. I never see a friend from college any more as she just monologues at me at the ripe old age of 35.

I am terrified of my already emerging repeater bore tendencies. My most used phrase is, ‘tell me if I’ve already told you this, right?’

The thing is, if you can only tell anecdotes a certain number of times, do you hold them back for years to whip out, triumphantly, at a key life moment? Or do they go off when you’re not looking, like wine? It’d be so crushing to save a really choice anecdote for years only to have everyone’s brow furrow because they never met Pete and don’t know what a VHS video is.

I think anecdotes, esp family ones, are just a human way of reminding each other of shared history, and reassuring older generations that people they loved haven’t been forgotten. I’ve heard my dad’s ‘the time your mother & I went to Paris/Swinging London/the Booths cafe’ story a lot over the years but I keep letting him tell it because every so often a new detail emerges which throws new light on other old stories.

And, obviously, because I love him.

The tea banter

Yes to this. How interesting! I honestly thought it was just my PIL. We now play story-bingo when we visit to check off each story as it's told. It's remarkable to me that they can sit and tell these anecdotes as if they are being told for the first time, when they have been churned out for the last 20 years. We have gone through phases of 'oh yes- then this happened, right?' They carry on. Then 'oh DIL, I know this one!' Still carries on. 'We know!!' Gets ignited and they carry on. Or immediately trying to change the subject- still it continues.

Even the kids know what is coming when they leap into 'oh, you know what this reminds me of, don't you..(something completely unrelated to the story I'm about to tell but I want to get it in anyway...) cue eyerolls....

Ah my DFil does this all the time! But, he’s in his 80’s, led a very interesting life and I honestly don’t mind, because he’s a lovely, lovely man.

DS12 occasionally rolls his eyes at him but I just tell him how I’d love to be able to listen to my DGD’s tales but of course he’s no longer here to tell them.

My Dh does this my dps are working on their Interested Face

My PIL do this. I don't mind at all. They are lovely people who have had interesting lives and still do have interesting lives.

I would give almost anything for just another day with my own mam and dad to hear their stories about our life as a family, their life before me, their childhoods,wider family stories. As an only child I feel like Iost it all with them and have no one to talk about them with who was part of it all.

My dad even tells the same jokes I've heard all my life. We call the punchlines at him now

Maybe if you stop doing a fake interested face and fake laugh they'll stop telling you

My DM always goes on about older relatives who always tell the same stories, but she is as much a culprit of this than anyone else. Sometimes I tell her I've heard it before, other times I just leave it be.

As it happens my MIL (who I live dearly) does do this and my Mum started doing it abut a year before she died, as if she had to make sure she'd told us everything (if that makes sense?).

The older you get, the less people you see and the less places you go, so the less you have to talk about. It’s very sad but I suspect it comes to us all eventually, only when we start doing it, it won’t be annoying because we won’t remember we have already told you that story

^ This is right.

My MIL also fixates on a subject for a few weeks at a time. At the moment it's the new car I'm getting. Next week it will be back to the ne-er-do-well grandson (not my child I hasten to add!). And after that, it will be about her friend who lives in a council flat and gets free everything! (it's true actually!) etc. etc.

Just let it be.

*love dearly

Yes fil tells dirty jokes too which is just hilarious

Yes mine do and it irritates the shit out of me...my MIL especially. Over the years with the grand-kids, when they've done something at school/outside school/been somewhere/won an award etc. she's ALWAYS got to add 'well I won blah blah maths award at school'...'I played Puck in the school play' I did this...I did that...she always brings it back to being about her.....every time. IDGAF...it was decades ago....
She's done it since I've known her for 24 years so it's not age and she doesn't have dementia.
My parents don't do it.

M mum does it,she also have phones me up to tell me stuff about people she knows but I don't ,yesterday she phoned me with sad news ,about a man who her and my Dad were friendly with him and his wife ,in the 70,s he died last week it is of course very sad for his family,but I haven't seen him since ideas about five and my mum hase nt seen him in years .

Oh dear. I'm sure I do this. Mind you, with all the negative comment that gets directed at mother-in-laws I can't say I blame them for staying on safe territory i.e. repeating something from which they haven't experienced a negative response or action - safe territory, maybe just blank interest. In fact, mid-story the other day, I mentally paused and thought, "I'm sure we've mentioned this before..." We often feel as if we walk on eggshells to avoid not saying or doing the right thing.

I just wrote, and deleted, a slightly mean post about my ex mil.
I do wonder though if it’s not the repetitive anecdotes that are the issue per se, but the lack of interest in anyone else’s life?

Yes yes, same chat for 25 years!
Also, when I talk about my children my in-laws talk about theirs like dh is the same age as ds, it’s so weird!

Yes, but so does my dad, my boss and most other people I know of a similar age.

My MIL likes to spend ages discussing TV programmes that she knows no one else has seen.

Haha my MIL does this all the time!! I have had 11 years to perfect my surprised face at the outcome of her repeated stories so think I'm quite good at it now :)

I think it depends on what they are repeating.
If it’s a funny anecdote, then surely it’s something we can all put up with, but if it’s a negative thing, then it becomes a drain.

From MIL it’s “the 17 bus was 10 minutes late again this morning”

Or, MIL having a go at our Dniece because she “hasn’t got a job yet”
Then it’s down the road of “how lazy the young ones are these days” potentially making Dniece feel shittier about herself than it already is.

And if you try and tell her/interrupt, then she repeats it even louder. Talking over you. Every. Single. Time.

And don’t even go there about holidays......