she felt an immense sense of gratitude toward him. Her mother's indulgence had taught her one important thing—and that was how to be generous. As a result, Deborah gave John what he had never received from his mother. She bought him big and little presents, just as her mother had done for her. She told him he was wonderful and she couldn't live without him, and she specifically praised him for all he did for her.
In this relationship, Deborah was growing up; that was her developmental task. She was learning the skills she would need as a grown-up, so she could function in the world. John was also fulfilling some deficits from his early life. Finally he experienced what it was to be appreciated and loved, to have some attention directed toward him.
Although Deborah and John may be unaware of the reasons why their relationship works, many relationships have as their raison d’être and their chief developmental task the completion of growing up. This is because many of us are not well parented. Perhaps we came from families where there were too many children, so our parents didn't have the time or the energy to teach us the skills we needed or to give us the emotional attention we needed. Maybe our parents were committed to the American dream of affluence and success to such a degree that the project of child-raising became a very secondary undertaking. Many of us were unwanted children, children who absorbed the blame for crises in our parents’ marriage or children about whose very existence our parents felt profound ambivalence. Whatever the reason, many children arrive at adulthood with severe emotional deficits of their own.
“It was a damn disaster,” one father said to his daughter, “when you were born. I'd just come back from the war, I was trying to go to college, and then you came along. I had to work two jobs and your mother was always exhausted.”
Because of the necessity of providing and burgeoning career opportunities now available to women, many parents are so preoccupied they don't have the time or desire to impart a number of physical, practical, or intellectual skills to their children. As a result, many of us come into adulthood without a lot of the skills we really need to possess. We don't know how to make our way in the world emotionally or practically because our parents, either through circumstances or some deficiency of their own, simply could not or would not teach us what we need to know.
We may be unparented in terms of self-esteem, personal motivation, or the capacity to express our emotions, particularly anger. We may be unparented in the ways of the world—“This is what a loan is,” “These are what interest rates are,” or, “This is what business is all about.” We may be unparented in terms of our health, personal hygiene, nutrition—how to enjoy and value our bodies. Or we may be unparented in terms of organization, how to make decisions, how to use our time wisely, and so forth.
Since no one set of parents can teach us everything, when we arrive at adulthood, we may well have never attained great portions of what we need in order to be ourselves. It's as if we've arrived at the doorstep of adulthood with our little overnight satchels only to find our bags have rips and holes in the bottoms, and we're not very well prepared to live at the grand hotel of adulthood. Our loving relationships are where we patch, mend, and repair the overnight bags of our childhood, so we can live in dignity and comfort in adulthood.
Discovering Our Personal Stories
Let's turn now to the other love story, Neil and Marie. Theirs is an example of a relationship that gives the gift of identity, and it shows how each partner can learn when valuable snippets of information from childhood turn up.
Marie was the youngest in a family of five children. She adored her older brother who, because he was so much older, was like a second father to her. Her father was gone a lot, so it was easy to replace him with her brother, who was also handsome and powerful.
Marie was always trying to get in her brother's good graces, to have him admire and adore her in the ways a father would. But by the time she arrived on the family scene, her brother had already coped with three other sisters. He was bored with being a brother, and, according to him, his pack of younger sisters was a nuisance. They were “into girl things.” They were trouble.
Since Marie was the youngest, she received the brunt of his irritation. “Your dolls are in the way again,” he would yell. “When will you ever grow up?!” The whole time she was admiring him for being big, grown-up, and handsome, he was putting her down for being little and a girl.
Interestingly enough, Neil had also been an older brother to a series of younger sisters. Neil's sisters had all been spoiled by a mother who always told Neil to set aside his own needs on their behalf. “Just remember they're girls,” his mother would say. “They can't help it.”
What Marie discovered in therapy was that her relationship with Neil was a replay of her relationship with her older brother. In fact, in their relationship, both Neil and Marie had recreated the roles they had played in their families. Neil became impatient and overly critical; Marie felt victimized and complained that he was always picking on her. Without knowing it, Marie recreated the role of the little sister who absorbed all the negative comments and criticisms of her irritated older brother (in this case, played by Neil, her irritated husband), while Neil was venting his years of buried resentment about the special privileges of women, as first exhibited by his three younger sisters.
This example shows how, consciously or unconsciously, sooner or later, most of us make sure that we watch the movie of our childhood. As one of my woman clients said, “I can't believe it, but my father was an alcoholic, my first husband was an alcoholic, and lo and behold, I've just discovered that my second husband is an alcoholic too.”
Another client, a man, said, “My father was an intractable bully, and so is my wife. I was always in a power competition with my father—which I could never win—and now I'm in a power competition with my wife. I can't win this time either. It floored me to realize that I'd married someone just like my father.”
As this story illustrates, relationship dynamics don't always follow conventional gender lines. For example, Liz realized that in her husband, she had married a man who behaved exactly like her mother. “My mother was in charge of everything,” she said. “She wore the pants. I married a man whose strength I admired, and then I realized that, just like my mother, Bob had to be in control of everything. He had to know my every move, had to make all of my decisions, had to make sure I never had any power of my own. I always thought women married men like their father—but my father was so gentle that I could never understand why I always felt so oppressed by my husband. Then, one day I realized that in marrying Bob I had married my mother!” These are all examples of people living reruns of their childhood movies and finally seeing the information they contain.
As the examples of John and Deborah and Marie and Neil demonstrate, whether or not we are aware of it, we form relationships to accomplish our developmental tasks. It follows naturally that relationships will often end because these developmental tasks have been completed.
In the case of John and Deborah, their relationship ended because their emotional wounds from childhood were finally healed. John served as a parent to Deborah, helping her incorporate the skills of adulthood into her life. Gradually, she became a capable, functioning, and self-sufficient adult. The more she applied the skills she learned from John to the pursuit of her own goals, the farther away she moved from him. In time, she began to resent his control. In fact, it became clear that aside from his parenting function, which was now becoming irrelevant, John and her had little in common. Indeed, their worlds scarcely overlapped, and like any other well-reared adolescent, after she'd learned the skills of adulthood, Deborah wanted to leave home.
As for John, he finally received the love he needed in order to know that he was valuable in himself. Being doted on, adored, and spoiled by Deborah filled a longstanding emotional deficit of his. He finally
