Divorce can bring a whole host of family wellness issues, one of which being the child’s future attitude towards relationships. There is a direct connection between the wellness of your love life and that of your parents’ during your formative years and even if your parents’ divorce was amicable, you will still try to protect your emotional wellbeing by taking a cautionary relationship route.
According to a new study, though experiencing your parents’ divorce, you develop a particular mental and emotional framework about relationships, exhibiting the effects of their breakup throughout adulthood. You accept, and do not question those beliefs, as they are deeply embedded within you and rooted in your childhood, but this means that those negative beliefs will control your love life until you do something about them.
One thing children of divorce decide is that they aren’t going to get married themselves, and avoid commitment altogether as they are afraid of being vulnerable. However, this extreme doesn’t help your emotional wellness either, as pushing down or trying to ignore feelings of rejection resulting from divorce does not eliminate them, so that pain will eventually surface, regardless of whether you’re married or not.
However, you might be tempted to go to the other ‘picket fence’ extreme and believe that marriage can be effortlessly perfect, so long as you find ‘The One’. This is a dangerous ideal as you set your partner up for unrealistic expectations, and you’re entirely unprepared to make a marriage work. A marriage requires more than physical attraction, it needs a solid foundation of trust, connection, respect and deep love from both of you and anything short of that will fail.
Within relationships, you might find yourself mentally waiting for something terrible to happen, so you can cut and run when your partner messes up. However, this expectation may only ever be fulfilled because you put that on your partner, and you sabotage the potential you have together by waiting for them to screw up. You may, on the other hand, allow unacceptable behaviour from your partner because you fear the consequences of being alone. If you saw divorce make life difficult for one or both of your parents, you might decide that staying with someone who doesn’t deserve you is better than separating, which could have terrible consequences.
You need to break free of these beliefs if you ever want to have a healthy attitude to love and relationships. It’s possible to create the type of love you desire and not end up as your parents, you just need to identify the problem and work on letting it go.