Why We Date People Who Resemble Our Parents

Have you ever heard the saying that we marry our parents? Turns out there’s some truth to it.

First, let me comfort you: it doesn’t mean you’re attracted to your parents in any way, shape or form. It simply means that your relationship with your parents is incredibly influential and it affects how you navigate romantic relationships as an adult.

When we grow up, we take what we see around us and use that to build a template in our minds of what something should be.

For instance, if cheating was common between your parents, you’ll probably have a hard time trusting other people. Or, if your parents handled conflict badly, chances are you find it difficult to deal with challenges in a calm way.

This unconscious pattern is called imprinting, and it relates to a combination of factors, including how we received (or were deprived of) love, intimacy, and security from our parent(s) or primary caregivers.

“I still have issues with feeling capable and doing things right. Unfortunately, I married my mother and was never able to feel competent in my husband’s eyes, either. I also never really felt loved by him, in the same way I didn’t feel loved by my mother.”

(Source: Psychology Today)

In order to break the cycle and start making clear, healthy choices when it comes to dating, you need to be honest with yourself and recognize if you still have unresolved childhood issues to recover from.

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Childhood Conditioning That Affects Your Relationships

As children, our innocence allows us to see the world in a rather simple, pure way. We don’t’ know what’s fair — we simply accept the circumstances we’re born into as normal, because we don’t know any better.

Up to the age of six years, a child’s predominant brain wave is theta, which is a very receptive brainwave state, often associated with creativity, learning, relaxation and daydreaming.

In theta state, the brain waves are slowed down at a frequency of 4–7 cycles per second. For you to have an idea, these are the frequencies you reach in a state of hypnosis, during which information can be directly downloaded into the subconscious mind.

This means that, as children, we’re highly programmable. We don’t have the ability to consciously evaluate our environment or the information we’re downloading into our minds. We just absorb it and store it.

If we’re treated poorly, we’ll think we did something to deserve that kind of treatment. If we feel loved, seen and heard, we’ll see the world as a safe place. For us, things are just that simple.

This applies to romantic relationships. The ideas we develop about love stem from how we perceived love when we were growing up. We may not have the words to describe exactly what we’re feeling and experiencing, but those memories stay with us and we carry them into adulthood.

Most of the time we are living life like a child inside an adult’s body — and the child within us yearns for attention, understanding, care and support.

With that said, it’s easy to understand how your upbringing has influenced you personality and, therefore, how it influences the type of person you date. Because as human beings we are drawn, on an unconscious level, towards what we’re conditioned to be drawn to.

“If you have a parent with a destructive attribute (critical, abusive, cold, unaffectionate) and you take that behavior personally, it creates a mystery: “How do I get someone who doesn’t love me the way I need to be loved to change into someone who will?” The way we try to solve the mystery is to seek a partner with that same negative attribute. This means that more often than not we’re at greater risk of finding a partner with a similar negative characteristic to our parents than a positive one.”

Toby Green, in Why Do We Date Our Parents?

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Attachment Styles & Emotional Bonds

Something that can be incredibly helpful when trying to understand our childhood conditioning and how it affects our romantic life is identifying our attachment style.

The Attachment Theory was first created by British psychologist John Bowlby, who described attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”

Bowlby believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life. It was not until the mid-1980’s, however, that researchers began to take seriously the possibility that attachment patterns may play out in adult relationships.

Nowadays, psychologists recognize 4 main attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant and anxious-avoidant. If you’d like to identify yours, I have another article in which I go into more detail.

If you have formed a secure attachment style, it means your caregiver(s) responded quickly and consistently — so, as a child, you learned that you could depend on other people and express yourself freely. This is a crucial factor because it allows you to get into healthy, stable, loving relationships.

If, on the contrary, there was poor parental availability and it caused you anxiety, you probably tend to attract emotionally unavailable partners who show you the love you were used to get: unstable, superficial and unreliable.

The more important questions you should ask yourself are: is it easy for you to trust other people? Can you be open and share your life with others, or are you unusually independent and self-sufficient? How exactly do you view love and relationships? And how do those beliefs stem from your childhood?

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We date people who resemble our parents because comfort and familiarity feel safer — even when they’re the cause of our negative experiences.

It can be difficult to acknowledge your emotional wounds and patterns, specially when they come from your parents.

However, now that you’re an adult, you can choose to deal with things differently. You can choose to reprogram your subconscious mind, increase your self-love and change your attachment style.

Some wounds will always be there, the question is: will you release them or bury them?

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.

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