시댁: why Korean in-laws matter so much (and how it's changing)

It’s the morning of Chuseok. You’re kneeling on a floor cushion in your partner’s family apartment, a wooden spatula in one hand, a tray of battered zucchini slices in the other, and a mountain of 전 (jeon, pan-fried savory pancakes) beside the electric griddle.

In the living room, the men of the family are watching a wrestling special on TV.

Your phone buzzes. It’s your partner, who is sitting in that living room, about six meters away: “괜찮아? ㅠㅠ” (“You okay? ㅠㅠ”).

Welcome to the 시댁 (si-daek): your husband’s family. Or, if you’re the husband, welcome to the 처가 (cheo-ga): your wife’s family, where the rules have historically been very different and, to be fair, much easier on you.

The short version: in traditional Korean families, a bride married into her husband’s family. His parents’ home became the center of holidays, ancestral rites and family duty, and the language still shows it: the husband’s side gets respectful words, the wife’s side gets plain ones. That’s why 시댁 is one of the most emotionally loaded words in Korean. But it’s changing fast. Couples alternate holidays, the wife’s parents often do more of the childcare, and the government and the National Institute of Korean Language have even suggested new, more equal family titles. If you’re marrying into a Korean family, the trick is to know the old script, then work out with your partner which parts your family still uses.

The vocabulary: 시댁, 시가, 처가

The prefix 시- (si-) marks your husband’s side. 처- (cheo-) marks your wife’s side. So:

시댁 (si-daek): the husband’s family home. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary defines it as 시집 (sijip, the husband’s family) “said respectfully”. That -댁 is an honorific, the same one in 댁 for “your (honored) house”.
시가 (si-ga): the same place, without the honorific. The dictionary gives it as “the house where the husband’s parents live, or that family”.
처가 (cheo-ga): the wife’s family home, the “wife’s original house”, also called 처갓집.

Notice the asymmetry? The husband’s family gets the polite word by default. The wife’s family gets the plain one. A wife says she’s going to the 시댁. A husband says he’s going to the 처가. Same trip, different levels of bowing built into the noun. For her own parents’ home, a married woman says 친정 (chin-jeong). For his, a married man just says 본가 (bon-ga, “the original house”) or 우리 집.

That last one is quietly revealing. 우리 집 (“our house”) is uri culture in two syllables. For generations, when a married Korean man said “our house”, he often meant his parents’ place. His wife was expected to adopt that “our” as hers.

Why the husband’s family came first

Korea’s traditional family was patrilineal: the family line, the surname and the duty to perform ancestral rites passed through sons. A bride was described with the old phrase 출가외인 (chul-ga-oe-in), “a daughter who has married out is an outsider”, meaning she now belonged to her husband’s family.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture is blunt about what that meant. Its entry on 시집살이 (sijipsari, “living in the husband’s household”) calls it the hard life a woman endured with her husband’s family, a product of the gender discrimination that hardened over 500 years of the Joseon dynasty. A daughter-in-law, a 며느리 (myeo-neu-ri), was brought in to serve her parents-in-law, carry out ancestral rites and produce a son to continue the line. It all ran on hyo, filial duty, except that the daughter-in-law was expected to perform hyo for someone else’s parents.

The encyclopedia also records the famous advice given to new brides: “벙어리 3년, 귀머거리 3년, 장님 3년”: three years as if mute, three years as if deaf, three years as if blind. Nine years of saying nothing, hearing nothing and seeing nothing. As career advice, it’s basically “keep your camera off for the first decade”.

Nobody lives like that today. But the habits it left are still visible, especially on two days a year.

The holidays: who goes where, and who cooks

At Seollal (Lunar New Year) and Chuseok, the traditional order is simple: the couple spends the day itself at the husband’s family home, cooking and holding the ancestral rite, then goes to the wife’s parents, often a day later, sometimes only if there’s time and energy left.

This is not just folklore. In a February 2018 survey by the job platform Saramin of 478 married adults, 61.9% said they visited the husband’s family first at holidays. Only 4.2% went to the wife’s family first; 19.9% said it depended. Asked whether that pattern was unfair, 54.9% of women said yes, compared with 14.1% of men. Same holiday, very different reviews.

Then there’s the kitchen. Holiday food, especially the ancestral table, has traditionally been the job of the husband’s family’s women, with the newest daughter-in-law as the junior crew member. Hence the jokes about 명절증후군 (holiday syndrome) and the TV news segments every year about backaches and mountains of jeon.

The numbers back up the jokes. In a January 2020 Saramin survey of 3,507 adults, 70.9% of married women said Seollal stressed them out, against 53.6% of married men. Married women named the costs of gifts and pocket money (59.7%), preparing ritual food (42.2%) and “시댁 식구들이 불편해서” (“my in-laws make me uncomfortable”, 36.8%). And when asked who caused the stress, 68.4% of married women named their parents-in-law and the husband’s family. Married men’s top reason? 64% said “부모님께 죄송해서”, they felt sorry towards their own parents. Everyone is stressed. Just about very different things.

One piece of good news: in 2022, Sungkyunkwan, the historic center of Korean Confucianism, announced that the holiday table needs no fried food at all and nine dishes at most, and that families should decide the details together. In other words, the jeon mountain was never a Confucian requirement. We cover the rituals themselves in our guide to jesa and ancestral rites.

The titles: who you call what (and the fight about it)

Marrying into a Korean family comes with a new contact list, and each contact has a title. Here are the main ones. Notice how they line up.

Person	A wife says	A husband says
Spouse’s parents	어머님 / 아버님 (eo-meo-nim / a-beo-nim)	장모님 / 장인어른 (jang-mo-nim / jang-in-eo-reun), or 어머님 / 아버님
Spouse’s older brother	아주버님 (a-ju-beo-nim)	형님 (hyeong-nim)
Spouse’s older sister	형님 (hyeong-nim)	처형 (cheo-hyeong)
Spouse’s younger brother	도련님 (do-ryeon-nim) if unmarried, 서방님 if married	처남 (cheo-nam)
Spouse’s younger sister	아가씨 (a-ga-ssi)	처제 (cheo-je)

Look at the bottom two rows. A wife calls her husband’s younger brother 도련님, literally “young master”, and his younger sister 아가씨, “young lady”, with honorific speech, even if they’re 12 years younger and still in high school. A husband calls his wife’s younger siblings 처남 and 처제, plain words, and can talk down to them. The husband’s side gets “master”. The wife’s side gets “brother-in-law”. One family flies business class; the other gets the middle seat by the toilets.

By the late 2010s, a lot of Koreans had had enough. The National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) had already listed 도련님 and 아가씨 in its official etiquette guide. Then, according to JoongAng Ilbo, it drew up a family-title revision in December 2018 after consulting with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission. The ideas included:

calling both sets of parents 아버님 / 어머님, or simply 아버지 / 어머니 if you’re close
making the house names symmetric: 시가 / 처가, or 시댁 / 처가댁
calling a spouse’s younger siblings “name + 씨” or 동생, regardless of gender, with 처남님 / 처제님 as another option

In January 2019 the Ministry put “improving gender-asymmetric family titles such as 도련님, 서방님 and 아가씨” into its official family policy plan for the year, and ran a public survey. Then, in 2020, NIKL published a short guide called 우리, 뭐라고 부를까요? (“What shall we call each other?”). According to Women’s News, it suggested options like calling a husband’s younger brother by his name with 씨, or through your children (“OO 삼촌”, “Uncle OO”), and stressed that there is no single right answer as long as people respect each other.

The key point for you: none of this is law. It’s a menu, not a rulebook. The researcher behind the 2018 proposal told JoongAng that the state shouldn’t dictate titles at all; people should choose. So in real families you’ll find everything, from a sister-in-law who insists you call her by her name to a grandmother who will look at you like you’ve just put ketchup on kimchi if you skip 아가씨.

Say / Mean: “아가씨, 이것 좀 드세요.” (a-ga-ssi, i-geot jom deu-se-yo) says “Young lady, please have some of this.” What it means: you’re a sister-in-law politely offering food to your husband’s younger sister, in the traditional title. If your family has moved on, it might instead be “수진 씨, 이것 좀 먹어요.” Same plate of fruit, very different politics.

고부갈등: the drama that never gets cancelled

고부 (go-bu) means mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. 고부갈등 (go-bu-gal-deung) is the conflict between them, and Korean TV has been mining it for decades.

You know the scenes. The mother-in-law runs a finger along the windowsill to check for dust. The chaebol mother slides an envelope of cash across the table: “우리 아들과 헤어져” (“Break up with my son”). The daughter-in-law serves the soup, and the mother-in-law tastes it in silence for four seconds before saying “싱겁네” (“It’s bland”). Even the slang got an upgrade: young Koreans call the in-law world 시월드 (si-world), as if it were a theme park with very long queues.

The more recent take is quieter and, for many viewers, more painful. 며느라기 (Myeoneuragi), a webtoon adapted into a Kakao TV drama in 2020, follows a new bride through ordinary family life: holidays, ancestral rites, small comments. Yonhap reported that its first seven episodes passed 10 million views within about six weeks and struck a chord with women in their 20s to 40s, precisely because nobody in it is a villain. Everyone means well. It’s still exhausting. That is the modern 시댁 story in one sentence.

Meanwhile, the 처가 is gaining weight

Here’s the twist that’s reshaping Korean families: the wife’s side is no longer the side you visit “if there’s time”.

Traditionally, the husband’s parents got more: more visits, more holidays and often more money. KBS, citing a Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs study, reported that in 2012 data on about 18,000 married households, 30.9% sent regular money to the husband’s parents compared with 20.2% to the wife’s.

But when it comes to raising the kids, the balance flips. With dual-income couples now the norm, grandparents have become Korea’s unofficial childcare system, and grandmothers on the mother’s side do a lot of it. In the 2015 National Childcare Survey (cited in a 2017 paper in Health and Social Welfare Review), the most common helpers with direct childcare, apart from husbands, were the wife’s parents (21.9%), ahead of the husband’s parents (15.3%). The same paper found that newlyweds living near the wife’s parents tended to have their first child sooner. Hence the half-joking phrase “친정엄마 찬스”, “the mom card”.

It’s not always a happy arrangement. A 2025 Korean Women’s Development Institute survey of 1,063 grandparents caring for grandchildren found they averaged 6.04 hours a day, 4.6 weekdays a week, and 53.3% said they did it involuntarily, because they couldn’t refuse their children.

All this has made the son-in-law’s relationship with his 장모님 (mother-in-law) a much bigger deal than in the past. The old proverb said “사위는 백년손님”, “a son-in-law is a guest for a hundred years”, meaning he was treated as a guest and never asked to lift a finger. These days, if you’re the 사위 dropping off the baby at 7:30 every morning, you may find you have been quietly promoted from guest to staff.

If you’re a foreign spouse or partner: a practical guide

First meeting coming up? Start with our guide to meeting your Korean partner’s parents. This section is about what comes after: the long game.

1. Ask your partner which script your family uses. Families range from fully traditional to fully relaxed. Ask concretely: Who hosts the holidays? Is there an ancestral rite? Who cooks? Do your siblings use 도련님 and 아가씨? Do we go to your parents first?

2. Your partner is the bridge, not you. The advice you’ll hear most often in Korea: each spouse handles their own parents. If the mother-in-law wants something you can’t do, your spouse says no, in Korean, to their own mother. If your Korean spouse leaves you to negotiate alone, that’s the real problem, not the jeon.

3. Agree on the holidays early. Alternating which family comes first, splitting Seollal and Chuseok, or going to each side on separate days are all normal arrangements now. Decide before the holiday, not on the highway.

4. Show up and help, even if you’re “just a guest”. Many families go easy on a foreign in-law, and you may be waved out of the kitchen. Offer anyway. Peeling fruit, carrying dishes and washing up afterwards earn more goodwill than any gift. If you’re a man marrying a Korean woman, roll up your sleeves at her parents’ place too. It’s noticed.

5. Learn the titles, then follow the family’s lead. Use 어머님 and 아버님 for your partner’s parents. For siblings, ask your partner. If they say “그냥 이름 불러” (“just use names”), great. If the grandmother looks alarmed, switch back. That’s nunchi in action.

6. Keep in touch in small ways. A “식사하셨어요?” phone call, a photo of the grandkids in the family group chat, a fruit box before the holidays. Small, regular gestures matter more than big ones.

7. Understand the face part. In-law behavior is often about chemyeon, how the family looks to relatives. Your mother-in-law may care less about the jeon than about Aunt Number Three seeing a full table. Knowing who the audience is helps you pick your battles.

Common mistakes

Assuming your spouse’s family is “like every Korean family”. It isn’t. Ask.
Saying “in my country we don’t do this” at the table. Save the comparison for the car home.
Forgetting the wife’s family. Being fair to both sides is the modern standard.
Taking it personally. Most in-law friction is about roles, not about you.

The 시댁 used to be a place a woman entered and adapted to. Today, more and more Korean couples treat both families as equals and build their own rules in between. You may still end up at that griddle one Chuseok morning. But it might be next to your spouse, with a smaller pile of jeon, and the wrestling on mute.