156. The Impact of Your Parents’ Relationship on Your Love Life

How your parents behaved as a couple, or showed you love, shapes the image of a partner and of the ideal relationship in your unconscious.

Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the founders of the Imago method, even gave this image a name: the “Imago.” According to them, this image of the ideal partner is ultimately the sum of the positive and negative traits of everyone who took care of you in your life (what matters here is the time spent with the child, not simply being the biological parent).

Based on what I’ve observed in my coaching sessions, here are the most common ways your perception of your parents as a relationship model influences how you relate to others:

• An uninspiring image of your parents’ relationship can mean that, unconsciously, you avoid “being in a couple” — having, for example, a string of short relationships to avoid repeating your parents’ relationship.
• The way you perceived your parents maintaining their relationship can shape how you behave in a relationship: how they showed each other attention, how they handled conflict, how they managed their emotions, how much priority the couple had compared to the family.
• You may also have been shaped by the gendered division of roles: what a mother’s role is, what place a woman has compared to a mother’s within a couple, what a father’s role is, what place a man has compared to a father’s within a couple, whether it’s ultimately more “advantageous” to be a woman or a man in a couple. This influence can lead you to adopt certain gendered roles, and can also shape which energy you cultivate most in yourself: yin energy, also called feminine, or yang energy, also called masculine.
• The model you adopt despite yourself. If you noticed one of your parents not fulfilling themselves in their personal life, and you have the impression it’s because of their relationship, you may reject that model while at the same time repeating it in your own relationships, because that model has unconsciously “set the price” of being in a couple. In your love life, the consequence shows up as alternating between long periods of being single, where you feel like yourself and fulfilled, and romantic relationships in which you no longer recognize yourself. For example, if you’re a woman and you saw your mother sacrifice herself for the relationship at the expense of her personal life, or if your mother is the opposite of your ideal of womanhood, you may unconsciously reject being in a couple because the price of being in one feels too high.
• The model you choose despite yourself. This parent may not match at all, or only partly, what you’re looking for, and yet becomes your reference model anyway in your search for a partner, creating a form of unconscious “loyalty”: either you get into a relationship with someone who resembles this model and you suffer, or you go toward your ideal partner and it doesn’t work out. For example, if you’re a woman and your father was a mixed bag — meaning you could count on him in a certain way (financially, for instance) but you also suffered in that relationship (say, he criticized you, or you feared him, or he was emotionally cold) — out of loyalty to that model you may unconsciously seek out men like your father (and suffer the same way you did with him), or, on the contrary, get into relationships with men closer to your ideal, but it doesn’t work (they leave, or you sabotage the relationship yourself).

These last two patterns aren’t gender-specific — meaning you can adopt your mother’s or your father’s model regardless of your own sex or sexual orientation. They can also form around a stepfather, a stepmother, an older brother or sister if you had an absent parent, adoptive parents, or any person who regularly took care of you.