14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new paper in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, in-laws are sometimes dreadful and utterly mean not by choice, but because they are programed to behave in this manner towards the person who is seeking to wed their daughter.
Researchers explain that it all boils down to resources. They don't explicitly say it, but I'm guessing “resources” means “money.”
Anyway, it appears that in-laws expect that, once their kid starts a family of her own, they won't have to start giving her more of their precious resources.
This is because they very much prefer to equally spread them among their children, and not have some stranger take advantage of them.
However, this can only happen if the person the daughter chooses to marry has sufficient resources of his own.
If this is not the case, then odds are the parents and their resources will be the ones that will end up hurting. Hence the fact that, whereas women focus more on physical attractiveness, sense of humor and the like when choosing a partner, parents are more interested in social class and family background.
“The conflict over parental resources is central to understanding why parents and children disagree in mate choice,” Dr. Tim Fawcett argues, as cited by EurekAlert.
The researchers plan to carry out further studies, and determine whether more conflict arises when the mother or when the father controls the resources. Which I still say means “money.”