Growing concerns about my sister

[SisterSledgeHammer]

My sister live overseas in a Western European country with husband and two children. She's been there for about 20 years and married for about 10 years.

Her DH has never really liked our family much. He used to hide it and crack jokes/masked insults but he's become more and more passively hostile towards us!

My sister over the last 3-4 years has also started becoming quite intolerant of our parents and their quirks and human failures, and has created big issues out of minor/common mistakes. She criticises them constantly.

She has now started to visit less regularly and it feels like she's retreating from our family.

My parents are so stressed and saddened.

I'm really concerned that her husband is isolating her from us.

I don't want to waffle and create a huge OP but we've been a fairly close family and had regular contact. My parents go over for several weeks during school holidays to look after their children. They're always welcomed when they visit the UK and have plenty of rooms in our parents' house. My dad regularly drives over 100 miles to Heathrow to pick them up.

She's saying they don't Skype enough but they Skype once a week and she never attempts to contact them. They don't ask this question or that question, they don't do this or that... but it's all stuff which is easy to resolve. It's like she's looking for an excuse to fall out... IYSWIM!

Does this sound like something we should be concerned about? This change in attitude towards us and retreating from the family? Could her DH be isolating her from us?

For sure.

Does she have friends where she lives? Or does he isolate her from them too?

Your sister lives in a different culture to you and your parents. Her ideas are informed by that culture, which is the one she married into and is raising her children in. She and your parents think differently. Do your parents visit her? Do they try to understand her amd her life?

She has very few friends where she lives.

Partly because she works in an industry that's fairly transient and people move overseas for opportunities; and partly because he doesn't like going out and doesn't "babysit".

She usually sees her friends when she visits the UK but now she's visiting less, she's seeing them less too!

It seems they're living a fairly isolated life together (bar work) and that would make it quite easy to drip his own opinions onto her gradually over time.

babysit

His own kids? It's called parenting.

He sounds awful OP. I'm really sorry. Is she at least happy with him?

I'm not sure you fully read my OP, user.

It's not a different culture. The country is very similar to the UK.

She is very very clever and has a very important job, which is novel to my parents and the biggest thing about her life that they don't understand. Very few people do understand her job. They do, however, try their hardest to understand her work and the pressures it puts her under.

My parents go out for several weeks each school holiday to look after the kids.

We have all been in very regular contact and are well informed of each others' lives.

I'm concerned about her change in attitude towards us and the fairly sudden ceasing of visits.

How can a country in Western Europe be very similar to the UK?

Shambu I don't even know if she is! She's not herself. She visited without him 3 times over the last couple of years and she was herself and it was lovely. When he visits with him it's like she's in fight or flight mode and is ready to snap for the slightest faux pas.

He doesn't help with the kids at all. He gives them biscuits for breakfast and then criticised me giving them cereal because "it's full of sugar".

We all try to be as nice as we can to him because we don't want to put them off visiting but it hasn't worked because fault has been picked with everything!

User have you been to Western Europe?

And the culture at her place of work, if it is very intellectually charged, will create a great deal of distance with your parents. Your sister thinks all day about things that are totally different to the things your parents think about.

I live in an EU country and have lived in several. They are all utterly different.

That works both ways... she must understand that her work is inaccessible to our parents'. It's unfair for her to get frustrated because they don't have a full understanding of her complex work.

The difference in her visits with and without him are very telling. She must less frustrated when she's on her own. Less snappy and short tempered.

I also speak 5 languages. If you have never lived immersively in another country/culture you are unlikely to have any grasp at all of the major differences.

Some EU countries are vastly different but some have many similarities.

Well of course she will readapt to your parents’ culture more easily if her husband isn’t around. That is normal.

What is not normal is to expect her personality to remain unchanged by the very different culture she lives in every day. Don’t try to judge her marriage.

No EU countries are remotely like the UK.

I've lived overseas for many years in 3 different continents. So I kind of understand living in different cultures.

I feel this is going off on a tangent.

I'm very concerned for my sister and her increasing levels of isolation. She's lived in one country for 20 years. Her attitude has changed over the last few years. Her attitude is very different when her husband is around. I'm worried he's influencing her and isolating her.

The cultural differences are obviously less marked than if it was China or India for example where there could be very, very different expectations of family and a wife's role. I'm sure that's what the op means, not that all of Western Europe is completely culturally homogenous.

Of course he is influencing her. That’s the whole point of marriage - you gain a whole new set of ideas to consider!

I disagree to the extent that, in Western Europe, people “go native” in the local culture to an extent that they do not in China or India where they remain expats/outsiders.

Thank you, stateofindepence.

But surely you don't influence your partner in a way that's detrimental to their relationships with their loved ones!

You are very naive if you think that there are not often irreconcilable cultural differences between the culture of your parents’ marriage and the culture of your own or your siblings’ marriage.

Ultimately though you can't help your dsis if she doesn't want to be helped. Keeping lines of communication open is the best you can do.

My parents absolute wrecked my sister’s marriage by refusing to let her adopt her husbamd’s culture. And they then had the temerity to be terribly upset because her marriage was unhappy. It didn’t have a hope in hell with that degree of parental “holding on”.

@User1499173618 You are not showing any level of emotional intelligence here. The OP is worried about her sister. Her sister's husband finds fault with their parents. Now the sister is finding fault. The family are otherwise close and the OP is worried that her sister is being encouraged to stay distant to her family.

It's nothing to do with whether German people are like British people. She was just saying her sister doesn't live somewhere that is hugely different, culturally.

You're coming across as very argumentative.

I don’t think there is much you can do other than keep communication open to her, unfortunately.