Woman Doesn’t Want To Share Location With Mother in Law

One of the features on our smart phones has to be the location service. How great is it to be able to track where your kids are at all times. But what happens when your MIL wants you to share your location with her also. Would you do it?

A woman has asked this exact question on Reddit where she’s wondering if she’s being the a**hole for not letting her MIL follow know her exact location. Here’s what she wrote:

My partner and I are recently married and my mother in law wants to follow me on Find My Friends.

I reserve FMF for exactly that, my friends. My own family doesn’t even have my location. Not because I don’t want them to, but because they don’t need to. And frankly they have never asked.

Now that we’re married, my partner is pushing me to share my location with their mum. They say she needs to know where I am to make sure I’m safe. We have argued about it a few times and it’s just rubbing me the wrong way.

Honestly, if I’m not with my partner (who shares their location), then it’s not her business to know where I am.

She has never had my location before and I don’t particularly want her to have it now.

I know it seems petty and the easy solution is to just share the location, but I want to maintain my privacy. It’s my location and I should be able to choose who has it, not the other way around.

When we first saw this story we assumed the woman has kids so the MIL wants to track her grandkids through her DIL but that’s not the case! She just wants to know where she is at all times.

To us it just seems a bit much. If her own family hasn’t asked to follow her and know her whereabouts then why does her MIL need to know? Surely she can just track her own son.

Here’s what commenters on Reddit had to say:

NTA- it kind of feels like she just wants to be nosey and see if you’re doing something she doesn’t want you doing. If she didn’t care enough to ask for it when y’all were dating or engaged I don’t understand why all of a sudden she needs it now.

How does that work? How does tracking you keep you “safe”. It’s a bogus excuse for not recognizing an adult’s autonomy. I suspect your wife is fuzzy about boundaries between her mom and herself in general. You might want to have her read Anne Katherine’s two books about boundaries. Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin and the follow-up Where to Draw the Line If you are planning on having kids, you want to address this now.

Tell your partner that giving her FMF would not make you feel safe, it would make you feel leashed. If MiL wants to check on you, she can call and have a normal adult conversation. And you can choose to answer or not.

It’s not loving. It’s controlling.

I don’t know how old you are. But you survived to this age without her needing your location. And what will she do? Fly to your location and save you? No. You didn’t need her as a child and you don’t need her now as a grown up to know where you are at all times.

Once you allow a relaxing of that boundary, it is going to be difficult to take it back.

Be very sure if you ever decide to say yes.

It isn’t love, it is control and nosiness.

You absolutely should not do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing, and it’s a bit concerning that your partner is taking your MIL’s side and is pressing the issue that much. It’s none of her business to have your location 24/7. Sorry that this weird, possibly toxic and controlling, behavior is showing up only after you already got married.

Do you agree? Would you share your location with your in-laws?

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