How Parents Affect Your Future Relationships

They Teach You How to Show Affection

"I am going to focus on how our romantic relationships are influenced by our childhood experiences," says Bergen. "Our parents' relationship is our first and most influential example of how to interact and communicate in a romantic relationship. How love was shown between parents is influential on the child." That makes sense because, when you think about it, your parents are your only example of pretty much everything. When you're really young, you probably just accept the way that they do things to be right—even if it's not.

For instance, if your parents were not very affectionate and hardly ever hugged or kissed you, you may have an aversion to affection as an adult. "Children will model and emulate the ways their parents show love to one another. Plus, how love was expressed to the child is also significant," says Bergen.

On a slightly different note, Bergen suggests that the ways in which anger and conflict were managed in your family of origin also play a large factor in how we communicate with adult romantic partners. "Whether or not a person tends to express their emotions more openly or tends to skew toward passive aggression, frequently parallels how their parents communicated with each other and with the child," she adds.

You Model Your Behavior Off Theirs

"Same-sex parents serve as models for our behavior, and opposite-sex parents are projected into potential partners. This also works in reverse, in the sense that we may search for the opposite of a father who was stoic and uninvolved," Bergen notes.

There is no difference in this dynamic between same-sex couples or cross-sex couples, emphasizing that it's more tied to whichever parent the individual identifies with most rather than their sexual orientation. A female could be more influenced by her father's behavior and mirror his actions in her own relationship instead of her mother's if she identified more with her father, regardless of her own sexual orientation.

Another example is a person may be hypervigilant to criticism and frequently argue with partners because their same-sex parent had difficulty advocating for themselves and became a "doormat" in the relationship. We tend to want to emulate our parent's relationship when it is perceived as healthy and positive.

Their Words Become the Voice in Your Head

Most psychologists would agree that any personal change starts with self-awareness. Bergen advises, "Start to identify where patterns of communication, thoughts, and feelings originate. Reflect on your childhood and try to remember the patterns you had in interacting with your parents."

Questions she suggests asking yourself include: Whose voice is that? Your adult voice of what you think and believe, or does it come from somewhere or someone else? "If your parents are still living, you can also start to notice how you interact with your parents now, and then see how those patterns may be playing out in your romantic relationships," she notes.

They Influence Your Attachment Style

"Groundbreaking research during the 1960s and 1970s by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth assisted in our understanding of attachment theory," says Bergen. "Since their work, many psychological researchers have examined the different ways secure, and various forms of insecure attachments with our parents affect our attachment styles as adults." For instance, if parents showed love, responded to our needs, and validated our feelings, we were more likely to develop a secure attachment style. We then seek out and desire that same attachment style as an adult.

On the flip side, if we had an insecure attachment develop with our parents, we may have a fragmented sense of self. This may lead to low self-esteem, anxiety in relationships, doubt that we can trust others, and sometimes being more apt to seek out relationships that mimic this same attachment—not because it feels good but because it is familiar to us.