#40 Why a 'happy marriage' might still screw up our kids...
...and other lessons I learned inspired by MAFS Australia
“I want what my parents have - a happy marriage that’s lasted forty years so far.”
I have heard this statement, or variations of it, over and over again from people who are single and looking for love. I’ve heard people say it on TV shows like Love is Blind or Married at First Sight. I’ve heard friends say it to me. I’ve read it in books and seen it in films and every time I hear it I think the same thing.
Good luck love.
Because, I don’t care whether you’ve been married for forty days or forty years, time spent does not equal perfection. Relationships aren’t linear. They are up and down, seat-of-your-pants rollercoasters, that you wake up to every morning and decide, consciously, to ride again even when you really, really, don’t want to, even when the ride feels boring because you’ve ridden it so many times, even when the ride makes you feel sick because it’s too bumpy because there isn’t a relationship in the world that coasts along without a few loop-de-loops along the way.
I think there’s a few of us in this generation that are lucky enough to come from stable family backgrounds with parents who didn’t divorce (not many!) and it’s easy to assume that those children grew up to be super well-adjusted and drawn to healthy relationships because that’s what they saw growing up. But what if the opposite is true? What if those of us who saw a healthy, long-lasting relationship modelled by our parents, only saw the half of it that they wanted us to see?
Remember, our parents come from a world where your neighbour was the most important person in the house. “What will the neighbours think?” was a phrase that ricocheted around houses up and down the country. The desire to conceal the ugly, honest and messy parts of life, was deeply ingrained in them and that applied to their marriage and how it was perceived…especially when it came to what the kids saw.
What if those of us who saw a healthy, long-lasting relationship modelled by our parents, only saw the half of it that they wanted us to see?
Obviously, many of us grew up in a shit-show sham of a family where it was plainly obvious how bloody miserable everybody was, but I’m not talking about those families. I’m talking about the marriages that were genuinely, happy and long lasting, the marriages that their offspring put on a pedestal and grew up measuring every relationship they had against. The marriages that make people say, “I’m not settling, until I have the kind of relationship my mum and dad have.”
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