Meeting the In-Laws: Designing an Out-of-the-Box Virtual Evening
How do we make this about them?
While many of us have (very reasonably) been focusing on maintaining connection with our loved ones during this pandemic, it’s been trickier to foster new connections.
And yet, life keeps happening: new employees join your staff, a family moves onto your street, a couple gets engaged. People are very much still exiting and entering communities. And each of these “doorway moments” are opportunities to shape our relationships, norms and values.
So should we wait until enough of us have received the vaccine to deal with the new, or do we forge ahead and intentionally design for new connection within our changing communities now?
Friends of mine were recently facing this dilemma. Drew and Clay had just gotten engaged. And like many couples, their parents live in other parts of the country and had never met. They decided to introduce them over Zoom. The parents didn’t know what to expect from a virtual introduction and were all a bit anxious to give a good impression. “They come from very different worlds (one family is Mormon, the other Jewish), so there was some nervousness about what their overlapping interests would be, but we knew they had a lot in common," Drew told me. And so the couple designed for connection.
They mailed their parents a little kit, each containing:
A red-and-white checkered tablecloth
A Deep Amber scented candle (from a company their out-of-work theater friends started during the pandemic)
A sealed envelope they were not to open until dinner
On the evening of the virtual gathering, Drew and Clay ordered local Italian food to each home, and with the tablecloths set and the candles lit, they “met” their two sets of parents in an invented, dispersed, shared experience on Zoom. Inside the sealed envelope, the parents discovered the following set of questions printed on golden tickets:
Tell us your proposal story
Where was your favorite vacation spot as a child?
What’s your favorite family recipe or dish?
Pick a favorite Barbra Streisand movie or song
What’s your favorite Beatles song?
Name one trait you inherited from your mother
Who is the most inspiring person alive today?
Name one athletic event that changed your life
Over the course of the gathering, the parents relaxed, shared stories, laughed, and felt a surprising connection across three slightly-pixelated squares.
I was touched when I heard this story. It was also, on their part, quite brilliant. Why?
They didn’t connect them as parents, they connected them as multi-faceted individuals. “Even though we know them as parents (they’ve raised a dozen kids between the four of them), we wanted them to connect with each other as individuals, so we geared to specific interests and overlaps (like Barbra Streisand and the Beatles),” Clay told me. Instead of having the conversational context be about Drew and Clay, they shifted the frame so that they connected directly to each other.
They honored their parents through the design of their questions. The content of the questions showed how deeply they know and have been paying attention to their parents, their interests, and their stories over the years.
They flicked at the previous generation, but without too much weight. By asking about a trait inherited from their mothers, this simple question gave their parents a range of choices in deciding how and what to share about who they each come from.
They centered the needs of the more reluctant and counterbalanced couple dynamics. “We were careful to add questions that would get the less talkative parent on both sides involved,” Clay told me.
They modeled ownership, creativity and competence as a couple early on. As men getting married in their late 30s and early 40s, Drew and Clay knew that they were going to take the reins throughout their wedding process, and they let their parents experience a meaningfully different way of doing things from the very beginning.
Above all, they had a clear, specific, disputable purpose: “We were really clear: we wanted this to be about them, not us,” Clay told me. And everything else flowed from there.
And guess what? They’re only halfway done. Drew’s parents (like my own) are divorced and each remarried. In a few weeks, Drew and Clay are going to host a different virtual evening with Drew’s other set of parents, complete with new questions and a shared menu. (I’m told plans are in the works to ship frozen pizza from a beloved Chicago pizzeria to all.)
These smaller, intimate dinners also inadvertently take some weight and pressure off the wedding. The parents already know one another a bit. They already feel honored and seen and taken care of. Part of the drama behind so many weddings is that we put too much weight on one central event to honor all the various relationships in our life at the same time. These small, thoughtful interventions done with authenticity and love early on allow each person in the system, as change happens, to take a deep breath and say: I am part of this.
Inspirations
Prentis Hemphill is a facilitator, a somatics expert, a visionary and a teacher. This week, they launched the long-anticipated Embodiment Institute. This incredible body of work is as cutting edge as you can get as a facilitator interested in creating collective embodied healing and justice. The first offering is specifically for Black people and there will be trainings for all people in the future. (Shared with permission.)
Deepa Narayan, a researcher and social scientist, has dropped a podcast this week that explores a deceptively simple question: What’s a man? Narayan interviews hundreds of men in India about masculinity, roles, power, and identity. What’s A Man? is a podcast designed around deep listening to invite people into conversations typically considered “obvious” or “taboo" to begin to create more options for all of us. (Also, she’s my mother.)
In the Age of Clubhouse, Must We All Become Moderators Now?
In his recent piece, Tim Leberecht argues that “the “public sphere” that German philosopher Juergen Habermas considered critical for a functioning democracy is not dead — it’s just a room on Clubhouse now, however one that will be subject to extensive (emotional) AI scrutiny (and optimization).” As the much-talked-about Clubhouse app slowly opens to the public, I’m curious to see how they (and we) navigate this moment of arrival.
