It wouldn’t hurt to show kindness

Dear Carolyn: My husband and I were high school sweethearts. Work kept us away from our hometown until about five years ago. His sister, “Jane,” still lives here and has grown into someone I really don’t like. It is nothing overt – more that we don’t have much in common, although sometimes she does interject her opinions to her brother about our private relationship. .

The problem is my mother-in-law. I am one of the few women on the planet who truly LOVES her. For the past 20 years I have considered her a dear friend. She now realizes the distance between me and her daughter is no longer about geography.

To make matters worse, Jane does not have many friends and is often lonely.

This year, my mother-in-law won’t even return my calls. How do I approach her when I won’t be held hostage to a friendship with her daughter? – All Set for Friends

A recap, if I may:

Your husband’s lonely sister has reached out for your friendship, and you “ignore her overtures” – not because she has done anything overtly wrong, but because you have much cooler friends to play with.

Wow.

Surely you: don’t claim to be perfect; do grant siblings the right to speak candidly to each other; do understand that rejection causes hurt feelings; and do see that you protect your image by blaming Jane for her own exclusion.

And yet these are the four things I get when I take the fact that Jane “does interject her opinions to her brother” – your only stated beef with Jane – and I break it down to its component points. Four points entirely reasonable and/or human.

Meanwhile, your implication that your mother-in-law is all but universally unlovable is pretty choice in itself.

Unless there’s more (or less) to Jane than you’ve shared, I can’t think of any harm that might have come had you just humored your mother-in-law whom you say you “LOVES” and invited Jane along once in a while.