Learning About Relationhips

As a psychologist it is apparent to me that when most people marry they believe their relationship will remain rewarding and loving; they do not expect to divorce. Yet the divorce rate is about 60% for first marriages, and is even higher for second marriages. So, we have a situation where people enter into marriage with great expectations; yet, have a great deal of difficulty maintaining them.

In order to understand why we have such problems in relationships, it is helpful to explore mate selection behavior. Generally, when we look for a partner, we look around, not be interested in most, be slightly interested in others, and then, all of sudden, usually when we least expect it, really "click" with someone. The words we use to describe this "click" are, "It feels like I’ve known him or her my whole life" or "I could have talked to him or her all night" or "I felt so comfortable with him or her."

Theorists who have studied this type of "comfort" have concluded that the click or comfort is an unconscious recognition of a conglomeration of early caretaker traits. In other words, what we are recognizing in a potential mate is a combination of traits that represent our early caretakers. We seek out people who hold these traits in the hope that, because they match the caretakers so well, they will be able to fulfill us in the ways we believe our early caretakers did.

However, because we do not live in a perfect world and parent education courses do not abound, instead of providing us with fertile psychological ground for seeking relationships that will lead us to fulfillment, our early caretakers have instead in many cases left us a legacy of hurts, sensitivities and insecurities.

As adults, what we bring to any present romantic encounter is not only our need for and want for love and companionship, but also our unconscious hope that our partner will meet, touch, and heal the hurts and unmet longings from our childhood. However, what happens in most cases is that the old childhood hurts are reactivated and our feelings of anger, sadness, and frustration reemerge as we relate to our partner in our adult life in many ways as we did to our parents when we were children.

In order for our relationships to grow, couples must learn to communicate in a way that creates safety, trust, understanding and love. They must learn to value their relationship and their partners as much as they value themselves. They must commit to a new way of communication, one that involves listening, restating what their partner has said, validation and empathy. In this way the hurts of childhood can get healed and couples can start to relate to each other in conscious and intentional ways.