Do you feel like you keep picking the same types of partners? Or do you find that the same issues keep arising in your relationships, ultimately leading to mutual alienation and breakups? The culprit may be subconscious behavior patterns that you carry from childhood. Discover how your parents and the family environment in which you grew up can influence your choice of partner.
The Father-Daughter and Mother-Son Relationship Plays a Key Role
Fathers and mothers are usually the first man and woman in a child’s life. According to psychologists, they subconsciously influence our relationships with the opposite-sex parent, affecting our partner choices in adulthood. This means that a daughter’s relationship with her father will shape her future relationships with men, while a son’s relationship with his mother will define his relationships with women.
Generational Transmission Triggers Established Behavior Patterns
Often, we subconsciously look for a reflection of our father or mother in potential partners. It doesn’t matter whether your parents were good role models. Their parenting approach, behavior patterns, and opinions remain deeply ingrained in you.
If you grew up with a cold, critical father who placed unreasonable demands on you and you could never please him, you might compensate for the lack of parental love and recognition in various ways. In relationships, you might feel a need to please in order to receive the acknowledgment and love that you missed in childhood. You might also overlook many red flags, such as manipulative behavior or emotional coldness from your partner. Alternatively, you might react in the opposite way—unintentionally becoming a reflection of your own parent, transferring your traumas into relationships and parenting your own children. Psychologists refer to this behavior pattern as generational transmission.
It’s no coincidence when a dominant man with manipulative tendencies chooses a woman who has low self-esteem and submissiveness from her upbringing. Conversely, a dominant woman who likes to make decisions and maintain control in the relationship may seek a man raised for a submissive role. This explains why some people repeatedly enter relationships with manipulators, narcissists, and other toxic personality types.
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Parents’ Relationship Often Sets the Benchmark for Partner Choice
Try to mentally return to your childhood and reflect on your parents’ relationship. Was it harmonious, loving, stereotypical, or filled with arguments and aggression? Behavior patterns learned from parents can be unconsciously transferred into your own relationships. In your attitudes and relationships, you may find a reflection of your parents and their relationship. Alternatively, when choosing a partner, you might seek the exact opposite of your father or mother to avoid situations like arguments, daily conflicts, or violence that you experienced in childhood.
However, this decision may not pay off. If you witnessed arguments or even physical or emotional abuse as a child, you might tend to seek a calm, kind, or phlegmatic partner. However, this type of personality may not always match your temperament. If you crave passion, emotions, and an active partner, you may eventually realize that you’re incompatible. Yet, because subconscious programs keep steering you in the same direction, you might continue choosing similar personality types over and over. This is why your list of unsuccessful relationships may keep growing.
Upbringing and Cultural Background Shape Partner Choice
Family background is often closely linked to culture and social norms, which influence our perception of an ideal relationship. Cultural values and traditions can affect whom we consider a suitable partner. Consciously or unconsciously, you may gravitate toward partners of a certain education level, social status, or religious background.
In families where parents, siblings, or extended family take pride in having university degrees, people with lower education may be viewed with disdain. All of this can reflect on your future relationships. When dating, you may perceive someone with a different education or social status as less compatible. However, the quality of a relationship is not determined by the number of degrees or a brilliant career. People from different backgrounds can bring new perspectives into a relationship and enrich it. You miss this opportunity if you automatically dismiss someone with a different education, religious belief, or social status as incompatible.
Break Free from Established Patterns
You might not have realized how much your family environment, upbringing, childhood trauma, and your parents’ relationship can influence your choice of life partner. If you feel that certain situations in your relationships keep repeating or you choose the same partners who aren’t right for you, it may stem from subconscious patterns that likely belong more to your parents than to you.
If you want to break free from these established patterns, it’s important to identify and abandon these subconscious behaviors. Only then can you start to cultivate genuine relationships where you have the final say in choosing your life partner. Therapy focused on relationship issues and personal development can also be healing.
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