Aaagh. Advice needed please on how to handle this sensitive situation. Clearly it bothering me enough to be posting here at 1am!
DH and I live 300 ish miles away from his parents. We are on the SW coast. His parents are retired but still v active. When we see them, they prefer to travel down to us as seaside nearby and lots to do. Fair enough. We do travel to them when able to, but DH and both work full time and in-laws have much more free time than us.
When we visit them, we stay at a local hotel as no spare room in their home. Likewise, until recently we’ve not been able to accommodate them at ours due to previously being in a 2 bed house and tiny spare room set up as WFH permanently for me. When they come here, they stay in a nearby guest house. This arrangement is something we’ve all been happy with, for several years.
But - DH and I moved house earlier this year and now have two spare bedrooms. With more than enough room for them, in theory.
The issue is - my FIL has horrific bad breath. I am not in any way exaggerating. I’m confident this is due to the state of his teeth. You can smell it when you enter a room that he is in.
For this reason I truely don’t want them to come and stay in our home. I actually would love to host them for a few days if he didn’t have this issue. Whilst not super-close, I do get on well with them when we spend time together.
My DH is also bothered by it, and he does get on well with his parents but he has been independent from them for a very long time and rarely has intensely personal discussions with them. He openly admits he couldn’t talk to his parents about this. For what it’s worth - he’s a wonderful husband and very supportive - but the fact he lived so far away from his parents for so long it means that he simply doesn’t have that very close relationship that I do with mine (we stayed local to them).
MIL has said that she wants to come and stay with us soon, as she knows we now have the room for them. I can’t face it. What do I / we do??!’