Inherited models of love (your parents' marriage in your body)

· 11 min read

The first language

You learned love the way you learned your first language, by total immersion, before you had any other available models for comparison. By age six, the basic grammar was in place. By twelve, the accent was set. By the time you started dating, the language was so deep in you that it felt like nature. It is not nature. It is one specific dialect of love, spoken in one specific house, by two specific people who themselves inherited it from two specific houses behind them. Recognizing the dialect as a dialect, rather than as the universal language of love, is the first step out of the linguistic prison.

What was modeled when no one was performing

What you absorbed was not the family's stated values about love. It was the unposed footage. The way your father came in the door after work. The face your mother made when his name came up. The temperature of the kitchen on a Sunday. The specific quality of the silence in the car on a long drive. None of this was being performed for your education. All of it was your education. The performed version, the things they said about love in formal moments, mattered far less than the ambient reality. The ambient reality is what you now reproduce, often without knowing you are reproducing it.

Replication

Some people inherit by direct replication. They marry someone with their cold mother's temperament, or their absent father's schedule, or their emotionally volatile parent's communication style. The replication is rarely conscious. It feels like falling in love. The body is recognizing, in this new person, the configuration it has known longest. The body calls this recognition love, but what it is recognizing is familiarity. Some replicated marriages function. Many recreate exactly the suffering the adult swore as a child they would never repeat. The vow is not enough. The pull of familiarity is older than the vow.

Reaction

Other people inherit by reactive opposition. They marry the precise opposite of their alcoholic parent, their distant parent, their controlling parent. The opposition is conscious and feels like wisdom. It is still inheritance, because the map is still drawn around the original figure, just with the route inverted. The reactive partner often discovers, in the second decade, that the opposite of one problem is often a different problem. The teetotaler is not your father, but they are not necessarily what you needed either. The opposite of distance is sometimes suffocation. The opposite of chaos is sometimes rigidity. Reaction is inheritance with a minus sign in front.

The body's home

Your nervous system was calibrated to a specific household climate, and that climate is what it now reads as home. If the climate was warm but unpredictable, predictability may feel boring. If the climate was cold but stable, warmth may feel invasive. If the climate involved frequent rupture and repair, a partner who does not rupture may feel emotionally absent to you. None of these readings are correct. They are calibrations. Recalibration is possible but slow, because the nervous system updates through repeated experience, not through insight. The new home has to be lived in for years before the body trusts it.

The fight you grew up watching

There is a specific fight your parents had, or refused to have, over and over, across the years of your childhood. You can probably recall its shape even if you cannot recall its content. The fight is now in your body, and you reproduce it with your partners, sometimes verbatim. The vocabulary differs. The structure is identical. The roles you adopt are the roles you watched. Catching this requires watching your own fights with the disorientation of an anthropologist, asking whose fight this actually is. When you find the original behind the current, the current loses some of its power. Not all. Some.

The marriage you did not see

There were rooms in your parents' marriage that you never entered. The conversations after you went to bed. The reconciliations in the car you were not in. The tendernesses they did not display in front of children. You inherited the visible portion of the marriage, which was, in most cases, a partial portrait. The invisible portion might have been different from what you assumed. This does not change what is in your body, but it does change the moral weight you assign to it. Your parents' marriage was not the version you saw. It was a fuller, more complicated thing, and the version you saw is the version you inherited, accurate or not.

What the gendered models taught you

The model of how a person of your gender behaves in a marriage was likely transmitted by the parent of your gender, or by their absence, or by another close adult who occupied that role. The model of what to expect from a partner of another gender was transmitted similarly. These models are often unexamined because they are presented as facts about how men and women, or other configurations, simply are. They are not facts. They are local customs, dressed up as universal nature. Many adult disappointments in romance trace to the discovery that the other person did not receive the same memo about how their role works.

The transmission from before them

Your parents inherited their models too. Your grandparents inherited theirs. The chain extends back farther than you can see, and what reached you was filtered through wars, migrations, religions, and economic conditions you may know little about. The cold parent had a cold parent. The volatile parent had a volatile parent. The unavailable parent had an unavailable parent. None of this excuses what was done, but it does place it in a longer arc. You are not the first to suffer this inheritance, and if you do the work, you may be one of the ones who interrupts its transmission to whatever comes after you.

The good in the inheritance

Some of what was transmitted is worth keeping. The capacity for fierce loyalty. The way of caring during illness. The specific humor used in hard moments. The willingness to repair after rupture. The kind of attention given to a partner's small accomplishments. Most family lines have transmitted something valuable, even if much else was harmful. Identifying these explicitly, naming what you actually want to keep, prevents the wholesale rejection of the inheritance that often accompanies the recognition of its harms. Not every page is to be torn out. Some pages are the reason you know how to love at all.

The conscious editing

Once the inheritance is visible, editing becomes possible. The edit is small, slow, and behavioral. You catch yourself about to deliver a line your father used. You pause. You choose a different line, less elegant, less practiced, but yours. You catch yourself about to fall into the silence your mother used. You pause. You speak instead, awkwardly. The edits compound. After years, your partner is married to a person whose love language is no longer fully inherited. It is partly inherited and partly authored. The partly-authored portion is the inheritance you, in turn, are creating for whoever watches you.

Living in a marriage of your own making

The end point is not the elimination of your parents' marriage from your body. That elimination is not available. The end point is a marriage that has become, over time, more yours than theirs. The percentage shifts slowly. Some people get it to fifty-fifty in their forties. Some get further. The number does not matter. What matters is that the marriage you are inside, with whoever you are inside it with, is no longer running primarily on a script written before you existed. It is running, in significant part, on choices you have made in full view of the inheritance, with knowledge of where it came from, and with whatever fragile courage you could find to do it differently. That is what successful interruption of a transmitted pattern looks like. It is not dramatic. It is daily, small, and almost no one but you and your partner will ever see it.

Citations

1. Bowen, Murray. Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson, 1978. 2. Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Oakland: New Harbinger, 2015. 3. Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: Harper, 2006. 4. Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2008. 5. Gottman, John M., and Nan Silver. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. New York: Crown, 1999. 6. Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 7. Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. 8. Gottlieb, Lori. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 9. Mellody, Pia. Facing Codependence. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989. 10. Real, Terry. The New Rules of Marriage. New York: Ballantine, 2007. 11. Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press, 2012. 12. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.