Parents affect your relationships in countless ways that leave you scarred for life. Just ask Romeo and Juliet. Or, better yet, look at yourself. Parents can interfere in your love life in obvious and less-than-obvious ways.
The saying that your parents love you and wish nothing but the best for you is true. After all, they watched you grow before their very eyes. No one knows you better than your parents. However, when it comes to your adult life, there should be boundaries—especially when you’re dating.
What your parents think of your special someone, or the way you handle your relationship definitely wreaks havoc on your love life. You often find yourself torn between your happiness and your parents’ approval. Their meddling even leaves you embarrassed and angry.
10 love life ruining parental habits
We know you love them. But should you really let your parents interfere in your love life? We’re weighing in on the ways parents ruin your relationships *if you let them*.
#1 Parents can be very intrusive. They help you move to your new place, help pay your bills when you’re running low and still looking for a job, and even put in a good word for you in that new company you got into. You may often think think, “Where would I be, if not for my parents?”
#2 Parents get jealous. Once another someone—a special someone—takes center stage in your life, it won’t be long before your parents become green with envy and feel sharp pangs of jealousy. Suddenly, you can’t visit them as often as you’d like. You can’t drive your mother to her weekly book club meeting, and you simply cannot stay for dinner for so long.
A lot of the time you spent with your parents is now being eaten up by your beau. This jealousy extends well until you get married. Good luck!
#3 Parents assume you’re like them. You have your father’s temper, your mother’s nurturing personality, your father’s eyes, and your mother’s hair. Beyond the superficial, parents often think you are like them—exactly like them.
You may even end up like them, getting married before having children, staying together and not getting divorced, and spending your anniversaries at the country club.
#4 Parents live their frustrations and aspirations through you. There will be parents who weren’t able to follow their dreams or were deprived of certain things while growing up. When you were born, they wanted you to experience the things they never had.
They hope you become a neurosurgeon or ballerina, when all you want to do is to put up your business. You see, parents live vicariously through you. Although they mean well, they hope you’ll do this and do that, and not date the jazz guitarist you just met at a local bar.
#5 Parents want to manage you. Meaning… your life. From the moment you were born, they set your sleeping schedule, decided your routine, got you into guitar classes, and basically managed everything, to ensure you had the best life possible.
#6 Parents think they know everything. They taught you how to use your utensils and how to catch the ball. So, although you and your partners are grownups with mortgages and careers, in their eyes, you’re still snotty little tots running all over the place. As parents, they feel that experience made them wiser and that you still don’t know how to place one foot in front of the other.
#7 Parents feel they are entitled to every opinion. Well, of course! They’re your parents, right? NO. Your parents may always take out the “I’m your parent” card and put you in your place as their child.
You’ll sit and take in all they have to say about your date, your clothes, your career, and your life. Although opinions and advice don’t have to be followed, your parents feel badly if you don’t follow theirs.
#8 Parents bring up your past mistakes. If anyone knows you best, it’s your parents. They watched you grow and develop your own unique personality.
That growth includes the mistakes you’ve made, which they were there to see. And now that you’re dating someone new again, they may start bringing up how you did in your last relationship, what you did wrong, and that you’re doing it all wrong again.
They might nitpick your every decision to the point you start to think they are just watching and waiting for you to fail.
#9 Parents pine for “the old days.” When you decide to be in a relationship with someone without the courting stage, your parents likely start talking about how things were when they started dating—and even before that. When you post your romantic pictures with your partner on Facebook, they’ll probably tell you how they used to keep a low profile of their relationships when they were young.
#10 Parents really scarred you for life. How you spent your childhood, whether or not your parents have a big hand in it, greatly influences you into adulthood. Divorce, domestic violence, parents splitting up, and other traumatic experiences have a significant impact on how you handle your own relationships.
