Your Parents And Your Relationships
What impact do my parents have on my romantic relationships?
I get asked all the time, "how much do our parents really affect our love choices and the course of our relationships?" and I always say, "pretty much in every possible way." Here's the thing, they were not only the first relationship you ever had as a person, they were the first relationship you watched. So the things that your parents did with each other, you're probably mirroring in your own relationship later on.
Does one parent's influence matter more than another's when it comes to my romantic relationships?
For both men and women, the mother tends to be the predominant influence over who they'll pick later on and how they'll get along. That's not to say you marry your mother, whether you're a man or a woman, but it is to say you tend to empathize with her a lot more when you're a child, both because you tend to bond a lot more strongly with her.
Does a difficult childhood relationship with my parents mean that my romantic relationships will be negative?
If you had a bad or troubling childhood, or bad relationships with your parents, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have terrible romantic trouble. It can though, because we tend to play out the things from our childhood with our spouse. We tend to make things right, and we tend to find our psychological even keel by repeating things that we've seen in the past. So, it's a pretty good indication you're going to have some work to do if you've really had a troubling past. More to the point, you have to find out what kind of past your spouse had, because that's a really good indicator of how much work you'll have to do with them.
