🏠 My in-laws want us to move in with them and I do not want to

My in-laws have started asking, more directly each time, whether we will finally move into their house permanently now that they are older and want family physically around them, which is a completely reasonable thing for them to want and not really the part I am struggling with. They mentioned it again at dinner last week, framed as a joke about saving on rent, though nobody at the table laughed. The actual problem sits between my mother in law and me, small disagreements over the years about how a house should be run, parenting choices, who decides what and when, nothing that ever turned into a real fight but enough that living under the same roof full time feels like it would sand down every one of those small tensions into something sharper rather than smoothing them over. We once spent an entire visit disagreeing quietly about whether the children should nap with the fan on or off, which sounds trivial written down and did not feel trivial at the time. My husband understands my hesitation in theory, but he also carries a real sense of duty toward his own parents that I am not willing to treat as less valid than my own reluctance here. We have talked through a couple of middle paths, a house nearby instead of shared walls, or a trial period with an actual exit built into it if things do not work. Nothing has been decided. What makes this harder to explain to anyone outside the situation is that it sounds, from the outside, like I simply do not want to care for aging in laws, when the truth is narrower than that, it is this particular house and this particular dynamic, and I still do not have an answer for either of them.

We went through this with my parents 3 years ago and it nearly cost us a lot of peace. The trial period worked for us, 6 months with a clear date to talk again. The kitchen was the real flashpoint, so we agreed who cooks on which days before moving. The nap and fan thing made me laugh, because ours was whether the tube light stays on.

Went through a version of this request two years ago, framed the same way around aging parents wanting family close by more often. Ended up offering to move to a place ten minutes away instead of directly in with them, which settled the actual underlying concern without fully merging households the way they originally wanted. Might be worth floating as a middle option here too.