“What is the very first thing a therapist asks a new patient to tell them about? Their childhood.
If it’s not that it’s, tell me about your parents. Why is that? Because, like it or not, your parents did have a major impact on who you are today.
Even if you are the complete opposite of them-they still shaped you or influenced you so that you wanted to be the opposite of them.
A lot of people dislike this concept, but it cannot be escaped and it is good to be aware of. Especially if you find yourself struggling to have things go the way you’d like in your life, like your relationships:
As a relationship and sex columnist who responds to reader inquiries and even worked with a relationship therapist on a dating manuscript (and, to be frank, has attended countless hours of therapy) I’ve found that the relationship your parents had had a significant impact on the ones you will have.
This is something you can make a conscious effort to alter, but you need to be conscious of it in the first place.
Happily Ever AfterIf your parents married young, never married anyone else, and stuck together through thick and thin-always madly in love, always flirting with each other, affectionate and clearly attracted to one another-you most likely put a lot of importance on the romantic relationship.
You observed how your parents meant so much to one another, so you seek the same dynamic. You put a lot of energy into your relationships-which is great. But, that comes with the downside of sometimes putting too much in, too soon.
You might pin too many hopes on every person you date and even start spending less time on the other things and people in your life in favor of spending time on the person you’re dating.
Unhappily Ever After
When I was little, my father would spend a lot of time tucking me and my sister in. He would come sing to us for over an hour.
I started to ask myself if he truly wished to work on his singing but I figured out eventually that, he just hated joining my mom in bed while she was awake because she’d want to argue.
So, while my mom went to sleep, my dad worked sang to us. It could have done him (and us) some good if he had taken some singing lessons. (Ironically, our mother was a well-known voice instructor, but of course, he didn’t want to spend more time with her).
They were living unhappily ever after-in other words together, but unhappy. For a long time, I accepted arguments and distance as something normal in relationships.
I finally learned that that is because my parents stayed together for SO long while they had those dynamics in their relationships. But, it is not okay or helpful to fight and be cold to one another on a regular basis.
Divorced Parents
If your parents divorced, you may have a hard time getting very close to someone. You may believe you desire love in your life.
You might believe that you crave to be close to someone but, your relationships always end. And that is you have a hard time seeing yourself as part of a unit. Why?
Because the one couple who was supposed to be a unit forever-your parents-somehow disembodied themselves from one another. They seemed to you like one entity that could not be separated, but it did.
And so, you may struggle to really meld yourself to someone else, fearing that nothing lasts and that, it will be all the more painful to split up if you intertwined your lives a lot.”