Anonymous wrote:Good gracious, no. My father is an emotionally abusive jerk, and my husband is a joy and a delight. That said, I started dating him when I was 19 and i would have been easy prey for a monster, but I lucked into a really good person and now I’m strong enough I wouldn’t stand someone treating me the way my dad treated me and still treats my mom.

Clearly your dad's treatment of you guided you to choose somebody like your H, do you get that?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have mommy issues and my DH is a lot like her. Oops.

That reminds me of that Rachel Green line in Friends. "I was so busy trying to not become my mother that I didn't realize I'd become my father. I did not see that coming."

I think it’s more accurate to say that we are influenced in our choice of partners by our own parents. For me, my dad was great, but my mom was verbally abusive. That abuse colored my perception of what “normal” was and I ended up in two successive relationships that were abusive, each in different ways. It’s taken me 10 plus years of deliberate abstinence and reading about abuse and self-contemplation to reset my expectations of men and relationships more broadly.

Family in general has a lifelong pattern of influence, both good and bad.

Woman here. I have a great dad who was a stay at home parent who was very supportive of my mom and loving toward us kids . Now I have a great wife who is not particularly like my dad but is also great. Can’t say that I see any correlation between my father and choice of a spouse for myself except that they are both good people.

A bit of a tangent here, but did any of you have dads who were just "ok?" This thread seems to feature dads who were great and dads who were pretty bad, but not much in the middle.

I continue to be surprised in the ways DH reminds me of my dad. I do wish it was more of my dad’s good traits, though.

My father was alcoholic and abusive. My mom and I suffered through it for as long as I knew and lived home. My DH is perfect on paper, good father but I see some flaws in his personality that probably reflects my choices in life. I wanted someone opposite to my father, I thought I was doing the most rational choice of a husband. In that process, I perhaps ignored the love and passion aspects. After being together +15 years, 2 kids, I found myself with an AP who is treating me in an amazing way, supportive, understanding, loving and almost 20 years older than me. So, maybe I found the fatherly love that I always craved for with him. Fwiw, AP was divorced when we met.

When we are young girls, our Fathers are our first Male family figures in our lives.

As young children, we think our parents are utterly perfect.
We do not see any flaws at all in them.
And we associate home = love.

And that usually means that our home life engrains in us how & what we use to set our personal bar up to what defines love to us.

For instance, say you grow up in a home where your Father is a liar, cheater, abuser or addict.
You are attaching those characteristics w/the actual term “love.”

As you grow + form adult relationships w/Male partners, then the things that you saw your Father do in your childhood home are things you look at in a future partner.

Reason being is these characteristics are very familiar and were the bar that set up your first definition of love.

Many of us like staying inside our comfort zones.
Therefore we gravitate toward what is very familiar to us.

Like another poster stated - even if that thing is bad.

It’s an unconscious behavior that needs counseling in order to retrain us to learn the tools to use to step out of our comfort zones.

For me, definitely. My sister and I used to joke about how creepy it was to say that we wanted to marry someone like our father but it was true. He was... the absolute best. Funny, loving, smart, infinitely kind, loved our mom and us more than anything. We used to listen to so many stories of how great he was as a father and husband - figuring out the bests system to tie a baby bottle for one of us to the ledge outside of their hotel window with floss because there was no refrigerator in the hotel, scouring all of the supermarkets in the tiny town in France we were in on vacation to find white grape juice when my sister was little because she was obsessed... I'm sorry for the tangent, he died a few years ago and man does it still hurt. I could have never settled for less for myself or my kids.

My father was a jerk, bordering on abusive
My DH is a really nice guy that I am lucky to have found

I do tend to be attracted to people who physically resemble my father in terms of eye color, hair color, and skin tone.

I broke up with a guy I was dating because he reminded me of my dad. My husband couldn’t be more different.

So, no I don’t think it’s true.

Had a really difficult father who was not kind to my mother.

Took me several years of aggressive self reflection and reading books on boundaries and unhealthy relationships and so on after a bad breakup in my 20s, but I got myself sorted and eventually dated a really nice guy in my next relationship, and the relationship after that was my husband, who is wonderful. So it for sure can turn out ok, but for me it involved some serious processing and basically consciously reprogramming myself.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good gracious, no. My father is an emotionally abusive jerk, and my husband is a joy and a delight. That said, I started dating him when I was 19 and i would have been easy prey for a monster, but I lucked into a really good person and now I’m strong enough I wouldn’t stand someone treating me the way my dad treated me and still treats my mom.

That’s great to hear. I usually see girls who were mistreated by their fathers or saw their mothers being mistreated, ended up with abusive spouses. It’s a vicious cycle. You seem fortunate to have a wonderful husband.

Out of curiousity, does your husband see you as ‘messed up’ due to your upbringing and does it affect your relationship with your husband? Or are you completely unaffected by witnessing your parents disastrous marriage?

I don’t think he sees me as messed up by that, although I definitely have my issues, and sometimes I have to say “look, you’re not doing anything wrong but it’s really reminding me of how my dad would get when he was mad about something so it’s super stressing me out.” My sister gets the same way with her husband — I suspect her husband and my DH would have a lot to talk about if they ever compared notes. FWIW, we see my dad a couple times a year and he’s pretty pleasant to be around when I’m not under his roof. We’re totally no contact with DH’s father.

Anonymous wrote:I wish I had picked someone like my Dad. I didn't, and the marriage ended.

Same here.

And I’m sure my husband wishes he married someone like his mom: Sahm, did everything, never said a peep, very passive.

Anonymous wrote:I have mommy issues and my DH is a lot like her. Oops.

That reminds me of that Rachel Green line in Friends. "I was so busy trying to not become my mother that I didn't realize I'd become my father. I did not see that coming."

I wish I had picked someone like my Dad. I didn't, and the marriage ended.