“My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” Clarence Budington Kelland
We all come into our romantic relationships carrying baggage – suitcases and trunks filled with past experiences, memories, and traumas. It’s this baggage and that of your love interest that will play a starring role in how things play out between you. There are lots of books and articles on relationships out there ripe for the reading, but no influence will be as powerful as the modelling we receive when we are developing our sense of self and our love map. Our love map is what we think is normal and will expect in our romantic relationships. What we see happening in relationships when we are in the highly influential years of five to eight will have a big part in what feels typical to us. During these years as our brain is growing rapidly, we are highly impressionable and what we see and experience in those years imprints on us.
Our life partner is one of the most important pairings we will have in our adult life. They are supposed to be with us forever after, the co-parent to our children, and take care of us in old age. We should receive some serious schooling into how to pick the right person and to form healthy relationships, rather then going by what feels right in the moment. It is only when we are in trouble that we pick up a book or go to a counsellor to try to figure out where we went off the rails and try to get back on track.
Intuitively, you would think children who had gone through a trauma would try harder as adults to avoid the patterns they witnessed and were subjected to. Still, this does not seem to be the case. Children who witnessed or were abused in their family of origin are likely to become abusers. Purely on statistics alone, we know that people who come from divorced parents have a higher divorce rate. The stats vary but find they are anywhere from thirty-eight to sixty-nine percent more likely to divorce. If a parent remarried, they are even more likely to divorce: ninety-one percent. It is baffling that it is this way.
Not only are children of divorced parents more likely to divorce, they are fifty percent more likely to marry another child of divorce, according to Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor and author. A relationship where this happens can increase the risk of divorce to two hundred percent. Does seeing a lot of divorce around us make us view marriage as disposable? The ex said no, but yet only one member of his family (out of five children) did not get or is on their way to getting a divorce. When we come from a family like this, we need to try harder going into it. We need to try harder during it and when things get bad, try even harder to fix things.
I am not suggesting we banish all those whose parents have divorced to an island and mark them with a scarlet D...that would be a pretty crowded island. Awareness is key. In the face of these odds, they need to try harder, seek help earlier, and let no stone remain unturned before even considering the D-word. You need to ask yourself if your partner is aware of the effects of not seeing healthy commitment and actively working on overcoming the impact.
So, what if there is no divorce in the past, are we good to proceed full steam ahead? Not so fast. One can come from an intact home and never witness healthy coupling. Look to the dynamics in the family of your beloved; parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Does his father make jokes like this: ‘Why were shopping carts invented? So women could learn to walk upright.’. That should have been a clue for me that women were not held in high regard. Is there a lot of fighting and disrespect? Would you want to be living the life you are witnessing? Look as well if healthy female/male relations are modelled elsewhere, in friends or co-workers. If someone has not seen healthy relationships growing up and works in a predominately same-sex industry, they may be doubly cursed. Sometimes when there are not opposite sex members around, an ‘us vs. them’ mentality is cultivated.