Can Your Marriage Survive Living With Your Parents? ft Heather McMahan

In the email that anchors this episode, an eight-months-pregnant professor in London lays out a plan: she and her husband, married just over a year, would move to Switzerland and live with her parents for the first year of the baby’s life. Her husband can work remotely, her parents can provide the village she lacks in London, and the offer feels like a lifeline. But she also asks the question that the entire episode exists to answer: “Is this the smartest way to give our new family a village, or are we sacrificing too much independence at a really vulnerable time in our marriage?”

Heather McMahan, the guest, has lived this arrangement. She and her husband Jeff moved in with her mother during COVID and stayed for years. So when the hosts ask her opinion on the email, she answers bluntly: “I do think this is a bad idea.”

What makes the arrangement work — and what breaks it