I (F 31) am married to one of three brothers, let's call them Alex, Brad, and Chad. I'm married to Alex and we live in the same town as Brad and his wife and daughters. Chad and his new wife (F 30) live across the country.
We used to live in the same city as Chad and his wife and were all good friends. However, now that we've moved, we're much closer to my parents-in-law, and this has created a lot of tension with Chad's wife and myself.
My MIL and I get along very well and hang out regularly, and it's very obvious that Chad's wife feels a great amount of FOMO and is very envious of that relationship. When she visits, there are a lot of attempts aimed directly at me to keep me at arms length while she spends time with MIL. She's an only child who isn't used to sharing parental attention, and feels particularly invested in being my MIL's favorite. I used to think only I noticed this, but my husband's aunt made a comment about it the other day saying she's noticed it being pretty over the top on past family trips.
My husband is very level-headed and says to just rise above this behavior and let Chad's wife do what she needs to do in order to feel good, but when someone is competitive with me, it makes me competitive too. Now Chad and his wife are looking seriously at moving to our town too, and I'm worried this competitive dynamic will be around all the time, and worst case, carry down to our future kids.
Obviously we are linked together for life and used to be good friends, so I feel like there should be a path forward to be less competitive. Does anyone have any advice or similar experience? Weirdly I don't feel this at all with Brad's wife, but I think it's because she and I are so different that there's no competing, whereas Chad's wife and I have much more in common.
TLDR: I essentially have a sibling rivalry with an especially competitive fellow daughter-in-law and I want to learn how to rise above it.
Submitted September 29, 2020 at 05:51PM by hey-hermano https://ift.tt/34cv9HA
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