Marriage: What Parents Teach Children

Published June 21, 1979. Marriage counselors and family life educators have known that the parental model teaches children much about marriage. Because of this, I have frequently assigned the students in my marriage classes at various universities to write a paper titled, “What I have learned about marriage from my parents.”

The vast majority of the students report many positive aspects of their parents’ marriage and indicate they hope to assimilate these characteristics into their own marital relationship. On occasion, however, a few students indicate they have learned other dimensions of marriage from their parents. An attractive, intelligent nineteen-year-old young woman from a Midwestern university handed in the following. It should be thought-provoking for all parents. She wrote:

My mom and dad co-exist. They have been technically ‘married’ for several years, but emotionally and socially, they are mere acquaintances . . . aware of each other’s existence, but no more.

Will their marriage affect mine? It will affect not only my future, but has been affecting my past and present ever since I was born.

Since the time I was about ten years old, I have followed their unhappy marriage from the stages of disagreement, yelling, and crying and through several threatened divorces. Marriage was nothing more than a synonym for disappointment, anger, and bitterness.

My early plans did not include marriage. A career would hopefully replace marriage for my personal fulfillment as it did for my mother (or so I thought). Nothing, not even children seemed important enough to undergo the apparent misery.

Through these turbulent years I became my mother’s confidant and sounding board, thus precluding me from having any facsimile of a relationship with my father, the ‘villain.’ (Was this planned?) Much of my mother’s bitterness and hurt stemmed from the fact that my father was a poor provider. Money was tight and was often not spent on the family. This burdened my mother with extreme and continual stress, making her wrinkled and old before her time.

Sex became dirty and “the only thing a man wanted.” I was taught that if I were ever unlucky enough to marry, that the filthy chore of sex would become my duty and drudgery.

Such negative experiences and attitudes spawned the overabundance of advice like “Don’t marry just for love or looks,” “It’s just as easy to marry a rich boy as it is a poor one,” “Don’t make a bad decision like I did and end up like me,” “Don’t get taken . . . use men or they’ll use you.” Mother’s whole emphasis seemed to rest on a financial or money orientation, and I’m now scared to death to marry anything less than a Rockefeller.

In evaluating my parents’ lives at this stage of their marriage, it hurts me to realize that neither is happy or fulfilled. They both are maladjusted socially and are suspicious and bitter about virtually everything.

I do of course, have other inputs on marriage and what it should be. I have some successful marriages to observe, my college marriage class to learn the how to’s and wherefore’s, peers with whom to discuss marriage, and an overabundance of mass media to tap on the subject of marriage.

I hope and pray to God that I can use all these resources I’ve been given to attain happiness in marriage.

(signed by the student)