6 Ways Your Parents’ Divorce May Affect Your Love Life
If you are a child of divorce, you probably have an opinion on the impact of the separation. Some express that the detrimental emotional effects of divorce have resonated into their adulthood. Others find that divorce instilled a new sense of security to their family unit.
A review of recent research suggests that family conflict is the biggest predictor of unhealthy adult attitudes and behaviors. While conflict is often associated with divorce, sometimes divorce resolves that conflict. It’s very possible you are an adult child of divorce whose relationship patterns are not a source of discontent.
As you read about these six signs that your parents’ separation is influencing your love life, keep in mind that no statistical predictor is your personal fate! Since 2000, the divorce rate has steadily declined to 2.9 divorces per 1,000 people. Adults of this generation are children of the divorce boom in the 1980s, and still their divorce rate is dropping.
That said, research also shows that the six relationship symptoms below could be an outcome of your parents’ divorce.
1. Low Confidence in Marriage
According to the Center for Disease Control, about one in three women of all ages believes that marriage has not worked out for most people she knows. Some of these women may observe this trend in their own parents. This may be true for you, too.
One 2009 study found that women whose parents divorced had lower relationship commitment and confidence. Even when the data was controlled for interparental conflict this was true. The study did not find these results in men, who had the same attitudes about commitment and marriage whether their parents divorced or not.
The research did not investigate the connection between these attitudes and actual divorce. However, a woman’s low confidence in marriage may lead to a higher likelihood of her divorce. In fact, Dr. Douglas Labier reports that both women and men who experience doubts before marriage are likelier to divorce or have lower marital satisfaction.
Doubt as a predictor of divorce is supported by research in the Journal of Family Psychology. A study led by doctoral candidate Justin Lavner found that women with premarital doubts were 2.5 times more likely to divorce four years after marriage than women without doubts. Men with doubts were about 1.5 times more likely to divorce.
LaBier suggests that this trend stems from a larger social movement away from the construct of marriage, regardless of parental divorce. The cause of the rise in divorce over the decades could be the symptom and not the cause of underlying problems in marriage.
It’s equally possible that your experience of divorce in childhood may have eroded your faith in committed relationships. If divorce in childhood creates doubts about marriage, and doubts lead to divorce, then your parents’ separation may lead to your own divorce.
2. Insecure Attachments
Parental divorce may also affect your attachments to adult partners. According to the theory originated by Bowlby and Ainsworth, attachment patterns are determined by your childhood relationship with your primary caregivers. If these caregivers were in conflict or absent, you may feel insecure in your love life as a result.
In a 2009 study for the Journal of Attachment & Human Development, children whose parents divorced were more likely to develop an insecure attachment to their partner. This was especially true for women who were in early childhood at the time of the divorce.
This particular study did not find that all children of divorce were more likely to divorce. But children of divorce who had an insecure attachment pattern were more likely to divorce early in their marriages than those who had formed secure attachments.
Another article from the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage found that women whose parents divorced experienced less intimacy and “mutually constructive communication.” Because of factors like their insecure attachment patterns, they were more likely to enter a partnership in which one partner is anxious and the other avoidant or where both are avoidant.
Again, men who experienced parental divorce were not impacted in the same way. Couples’ intimacy was also not impacted if both partners had divorced parents. While the reason for this was not studied, it could be that empathy for the others’ experience builds intimacy.
In general, you are more likely to experience all of these effects if you are a woman.
3. Many Sexual Partners
Are you someone who enjoys uncommitted sex? Someone who has had a string of short-term relationships? Are you seen as a sexual authority by your friends because of your early sexual experiences?
If your answer to any of these questions is “yes,” your parents’ divorce may have shaped your relationship to sex and romance.
Both men and women whose parents divorced have a higher total number of sexual partners. Just as low confidence and insecure attachments are more common in women, some studies find that sexual activity is the highest for female teenagers of divorce.
In an Icelandic report on people in their twenties, those who experienced parental divorce were younger when they first had sex than adults whose parents remained married. They were also more likely to engage in serial monogamy. In other words, they had many “short love affairs,” and their first relationships began when they were younger.
The greater likelihood of beginning relationships earlier may explain the higher number of sexual partners. Then again, you may also be engaged in a pattern of casual sex.
Why might divorce lead to more sexual partners? Some research suggests that you are likely to have more partners if your mother had more sexual partners. And your mother may have had more sexual partners in your childhood if your parents were divorced.
In fact, many maternal attitudes may be inherited. Poor relationship skills and other traits that prevent successful marriage may pass from generation to generation. Therefore, study of the way mothers influence their children may offer more insight into how sexual patterns are transmitted.
What does this mean for you? If you are a child of divorce, pay attention to your mother’s response and attitudes—they may have the biggest influence on your relationship life today, even if we don’t yet understand why.
4. Poor Conflict Resolution
A parental divorce causes more trouble for your adult relationships if it was hostile. Children learn their conflict resolution by observing their parents. If there is unresolved conflict between parents, children learn poor conflict management skills and dysfunctional behavior.
As a result, children may engage in behavior that they learned while growing up in families with severe conflict. It’s important to note that some studies find that divorce on its own does not produce poorly adjusted romantic relationships. It’s family conflict and sex that are more closely related to intimacy.
While many of the consequences of parental divorce affect women more than men, it’s actually men who are impacted more by a contentious parental relationship.
Poor or absent conflict resolution strategies in a man’s family of origin make him more likely than a woman with a similar family dynamic to choose divorce as a probable outcome. This was true for many relationships scenarios, including lack of spark, frequent arguing, and affairs.
Because of cultural attitudes about gender, it may be that women engage in more varied relationships and so have an opportunity to learn conflict resolution outside the parental model. However, the culture of masculinity is shifting, which may lead to less pessimism around relational conflict.
While 43.6% of men aged 35-44 agree that divorce is the best solution to relationship conflict, only 36.2% of men a decade younger think this. Overall, this CDC statistic is down for both genders. In 2002, about half of both men and women felt divorce was the best outcome in a conflicted partnership.
This could be due to declines in the divorce rate since the 1980s, resulting in less exposure to divorce among some Millennials and Generation Z. But it might also speak to larger cultural trends that have pushed young people to develop better communication skills, wait longer to marry, or choose other ways to celebrate love.
5. Choosing Separation Over Communication
Just as children learn all early values from their parents, they pick up ideas about the nature of commitment. Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist who has published extensive research on divorce, suggests that children don’t learn important lessons about lasting commitment if their parents divorce rather than reconcile. Separation becomes a normal response.
As a result, adult children of divorce may choose to separate instead of communicating about their relationship troubles. Or they make the call to separate sooner than others.
There could be many reasons for this, and some of these are discussed by Joe Pinsker for The Atlantic.
Apart from inheriting relationship values that tolerate low commitment, Dr. Wolfinger also tells Pinsker that you may actually inherit genes that make you more likely to divorce. Part of “being a jerk” appears to be genetic. If the reason your parents divorced has to do with one or both of them “being a jerk,” then you are more likely to divorce because you are more likely to, well, be a jerk.
Divorce can also be associated with a number of other early life factors—low education quality and physical well-being, for instance—that also predispose people, especially young people, to relationship instability.
No parental divorce is equal to another. If you are an adult child of divorce who has a history of short-term connections, ask yourself if that comes from the normalization of separation in your young life.
And if separation feels easy and comfortable for you, you can look at the specifics of your young life, including the way your biological parents interacted, to determine what factors influence your own beliefs.
6. Preference for Unconventional Commitments
Choosing against marriage is more accepted than ever before. There are many alternatives, and you may be drawn to one or more of them.
According to the CDC, roughly two-thirds of the population across all age groups believed that living together before marriage is likely to prevent divorce. Therefore, many couples intentionally choose long-term cohabitation.
There is also a movement to reclaim the word “spinster,” which carried connotations of lower status for women who did not marry. Books like Kate Bolick’s Spinster argue that remaining single is also full of pleasure and possibility for women, more than ever before.
Some people may also reject the idea of “forever” and enjoy serial monogamy. Others go a step further and choose a relationship model that involves commitment to more than one person. This is known as polyamory.
For many who choose alternatives to marriage, the friend network or kin group becomes more intimate and supportive. Relationships within the friend group may be fluid, involving sex and romance under the umbrella of a long-term commitment to friendship.
Regardless of the alternative model you prefer, your openness to it may be influenced by your parents’ relationship. Specifically, you may share your parents’ attitudes toward sex, cohabitation, being single, and more.
However, you are more likely to share these attitudes if your parents’ marital quality was high. If your parents’ marriage was conflicted, you may be less likely to share any of their beliefs, not just ones about relationships.
Even if your lifestyle choices are positive for you, they may be influenced by the state of your parents’ marriage. This includes the choice to divorce.
I’m experiencing one or more of these symptoms. What now?
Are you unhappy? Do you want to change the patterns you observe? Then, congratulations! The first step is awareness.
Next, you could take steps to educate yourself or seek the guidance of a therapist.
Many who study divorce acknowledge that more research must be done to determine how and why parental divorce causes any of the relationship choices described above. While divorce may be related to your choices, it may not be the underlying cause.
Scientists could also explore divorce through a positive framework. How has access to divorce empowered people to make choices that work better for their personal growth?
Finally, the erosion of the construct of marriage is a larger societal trend that may have nothing to do with divorce. In fact, many functional and ethical reasons make up a case against marriage.
These points may resonate with you if you feel content with your relationship choices despite your parents’ divorce. There is no reason to change a healthy pattern for you, even if it appears at odds with a traditional understanding of relationships.
