Dating Someone Whose Parents Will Always Have a Vote
A partner can be decisive on Saturday and still wait on a parent for the lease. Find out which calls those are.
Find out which decisions still go home before you are the one waiting on the call.
Anjali Mehta writes about marriage, in-laws, family planning, and the quiet negotiations of South Asian family life in North America.
The call you are not on
You hear it in a small pause. A job in another city, a cheaper apartment, the weekend you were going to meet your own parents. "Let me ask first."
Sometimes that is manners. Sometimes the plan is not real until a parent says yes. The person who is easy company can be either, and dinner will not tell you which.
A last name will not tell you either.
How large a vote, and whose
Pew Research Center asked 3,511 Asian American adults, in early 2012, how much influence parents should have on a child's choice of spouse.
Sixty-one percent said at least some. Seventeen percent said a lot, and 45 percent said some.
Pew did not ask anyone to separate a courtesy call from a veto. The 61 percent were not one kind of family.
Immigrants were more likely than people born in the United States to want parents involved, 65 percent versus 49 percent. Where Pew could separate the largest groups, Korean Americans were at 75 percent and Japanese Americans at 48 percent.
The same survey asked about a child's line of work. Two-thirds said parents should have at least some influence there, and 17 percent said a lot. A vote on the job is a vote on the city, and on whether you are in that city together.
In later surveys, Pew asked whether people would be comfortable if a relative married outside their group. Comfort at the wedding is a softer question than a parent helping choose the spouse. The choosing question is from 2012. This family can give you a newer answer.
The argument is often closer than race
The fight is not always with "someone who is not Asian." Sharon Shenhav, then a psychology researcher at the University of California, Irvine, asked students what they and their parents actually fought about.
In a 2017 paper, she and her colleagues surveyed 628 unmarried undergraduates, ages 18 to 25, at two West Coast universities. A student could call a relationship intercultural when they or their family saw a difference in culture, ethnicity, race, or religion. A Chinese student dating a Korean student counted. So did a difference in faith.
Those relationships showed up about as often among Asian, Latino, and European students. The conflict did not. Students of Asian background saw a wider gap between their own view and the view they thought their parents held. They were more likely than Latino students to say they had fought with their parents about it.
These were heterosexual undergraduates, so read it as college dating. Families that had arrived more recently, the first and second generation, reported the conflict more often than families that had been in the United States for three generations.
A Sunday phone call will not tell you which of those families you are in.
A parent's no will not pull you closer
People like the idea that a parent's objection makes two people more certain. H. Colleen Sinclair, a psychologist at Mississippi State University, followed 396 people in relationships for three to four months and could not find it.
The group was recruited online, about three-quarters white, average age about 32. She was repeating the measures from a 1972 study, the Romeo and Juliet effect. More interference, or less approval, went with a worse relationship on the measures her team tracked.
If you are hoping the friction will bond you, that hope did not show up here.
What "let me ask first" is covering
"My parents are close" can mean Sunday noodles on a laptop. It can also mean their name is still on the lease, or a transfer that was supposed to end years ago.
Don't ask the whole list in the car after a tense dinner. The table below is for other nights. Start with one. When did you last tell them no, and what did the month after look like?
If they can tell that story, you can hear the size of the vote. If they cannot think of a no, the decision may not have come up yet. A move or a baby will bring it up.
When your partner already goes quiet in the room with those parents, When Your Partner Won't Stand Up to Their Parents is for that later quiet. Once a child or an aging parent is in the picture, the heavier votes are in Before You Have Kids Together.
| The decision | Ask this |
|---|---|
| The person | Who has to be comfortable with me before this counts? |
| The city | If the job is somewhere else, who else has to agree? |
| The money | What already goes to a parent, and who decided that? |
| The no | When did you last tell them no, and what happened after? |
Spouse and career figures are from Pew Research Center's 2012 Asian-American Survey (3,511 adults, Jan. 3 to March 27, 2012). The intercultural-dating findings are from Shenhav, Campos, and Goldberg, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2017), a survey of 628 undergraduates ages 18 to 25. The interference finding is from Sinclair, Hood, and Wright, Social Psychology (2014), 396 people followed for three to four months.
One text before the next dinner
Send this before the dinner, not during it.
"If we wanted to move for a job, who else would need to be all right with it?"
If they say nobody, and their last move went that way, the pause was manners. If they name a parent, you have the size of the vote. You heard it from them, before a lease did.