I’ve often heard people say that what we look for in partners is what we are used to, what we’re comfortable with, no matter if it’s good or bad. I know that I got pretty down on myself when I started to get comments from my ex-boyfriend that hit straight to the core, but instead of stopping myself and asking, “Do I deserve this?” I went into action. I tried to make it better. I tried to understand why he might be saying that to me instead of questioning whether I agreed with him. And I realize now that I was operating on lessons that I had learned early on as a child. My early years were fragile. My parents separated when I was four and then divorced when I was five. What I remember most from that time in our family’s life was a big fight that they had in the kitchen. I sat on the stairs with my two older sisters, listening, and I remember wondering if this was the fight that would finally break the straw of our family back. I wonder now if these early moments didn’t set the tone for what I would look for—and tolerate—in my relationships later in life.
Judith Wallerstein, founder of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition, and a senior lecturer emeriti at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, researched over a hundred children of divorce over a twenty-five year period. What she found made sense to me. She said that adult children of divorce were not only affected at the time of divorce, but that they have difficulty forming intimate relationships in their twenties and thirties, when intimate relationships become the central focus in their lives. In her book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, Wallerstein talks about the conditions that many children of divorce might find themselves in as adults. She writes, “The amalgam of fear and loneliness can lead to multiple affairs, hasty marriages, early divorce, and—if no take-home lessons are gleaned from it all—a second and third round of the same. Or they can stay trapped in bad relationships for many years...This is the central impediment blocking the developmental journey for children of divorce. The psychological scaffolding that they need to construct a happy marriage has been badly damaged by the two people they depended on while growing up.” After reading this, I thought back to me on the stairs, and wondered if those few moments I remembered as a child didn’t form my own dysfunctional scaffolding.
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