Your parents usually have good intentions at heart when they try to give you relationship advice. But one thing they won’t tell you is that you don’t have to take their word for what works in a healthy partnership and what doesn’t. The honest truth is that although you love where your parents are coming from with their hopes for your happy relationship. However, they don’t know what’s best for you and your partner.
6 Pieces of Relationship Advice Your Parents Won’t Give You
Parents don’t get to decide whether you will be happy with your partner or not. But sometimes, they like to butt in and give you a taste of some advice that they think will help you. It’s none of their business. Still, telling them, that might not save you from hearing their well-intentioned advice anyway.
Let’s look at six pieces of relationship advice your parents won’t give you. You will also read why you’re sometimes better off learning these lessons alone.
1. Your relationship might turn out a lot like your parents’ relationship
Researchers at Florida State University studied young adult romantic relationships and the role of parents’ marital problems on their children’s relationships. They found that if the parents experienced marital conflict problems, they could predict that their children would have conflict problems in their relationships as young adults.
The important piece of relationship advice that your parents won’t give you is to look at whether or not your parents were able to communicate effectively and resolve problems without fighting. If you saw many arguments between your parents, learn how to avoid repeating these problems in your current and future relationships. Otherwise, you may follow in their unhappy footsteps.
2. You don’t have to settle for someone just to avoid being lonely
Perhaps your parents worried about you becoming a spinster or never giving them the grandchildren they had always dreamed of. Well, the piece of advice that your parents won’t give you is that you don’t have to live up to their expectations for you. Just because they worry about you being alone your whole life doesn’t mean you have to take on that worry for yourself.
3. Being your authentic self will make it easier to find the right person for you
The true you is always the best you, and being yourself, even if it means being quirky or different from most people, will help you attract the person who best fits you in a romantic relationship. But you won’t hear this piece of advice from your parents. Instead, they will probably tell you to me more this or less that, which doesn’t do you or your romantic partner any good since you’re just concealing your true nature.
4. Intimacy is natural, fun, and healthy, even before marriage
Your parents’ attitudes and beliefs about sexuality are often transmitted to children by how restrictive the parents are when their children are teenagers. Your parents won’t tell you that their opinions about sex were primarily shaped by their own parents’ beliefs and their parents’ religious beliefs about sexuality. But the real advice that your parents won’t give you about sex is that your body belongs to you alone and that if you find joy in sex, are safe, and are not hurting anyone, you are having more fun than they did.
Related article: 8 Parenting Behaviors That Keep Children From Being Successful
Researchers at the University of Michigan surveyed parents and their teens and found that attitudes about premarital sex were largely the same for both of them, with restrictive parents having teens who felt that they should wait to have sex. Social norms and attitudes about sex have changed dramatically since your grandparents’ day. Indeed, the sex advice you get from your parents is not necessarily suitable for you in your relationship.
5. A successful relationship doesn’t have to lead to marriage
Marriage is not ideal for a happy relationship. Still, your parents won’t give you this piece of advice because they were most likely raised with more traditional, church-wedding expectations.
Related article: Don’t Let Anxiety Create These Problems In Your Relationship
6. Having children doesn’t have to be the goal of a romantic relationship either
Not everyone is suited for parenting, and not everyone wants to be a parent anyway. There is no reason that you should let your parents’ expectations dictate whether you add to the next generation or not. Of course, they will tell you that they’d love to spoil their grandchildren and that raising you was easy and a constant source of joy. But where will they be at three am when you’re exhausted and need to sleep before you get up in three hours for work and their darling grandchild just threw up? That’s another piece of advice that your parents won’t give you; when it comes to raising their grandkids, you’re on your own.
