You don't need to recreate your parents' marriage

There is something beautiful about growing up watching a marriage that lasts.

Maybe your parents have been together for 35 or 40 years. Maybe they still genuinely enjoy one another's company. They go everywhere together. Your mum goes to get her hair done and your dad drives her there and waits in the car or sits in the salon. They shop together, travel together, eat together and seem to have spent most of their adult lives operating as a unit.

When that is the relationship you grew up around, it is understandable that you might enter adulthood thinking:

"I want what my parents have."

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Having a loving, committed, long-term relationship in front of you can give you an extraordinary frame of reference. It can teach you that relationships can survive difficult seasons, that people can remain friends after decades together and that commitment can mean continuing to choose somebody long after the excitement of the beginning has passed.

But there is a danger in allowing a role model to become a blueprint.

Because you are not your mother.

Your partner is not your father.

And your relationship is not their marriage.

We inherit ideas about what love is supposed to look like

Long before we start dating, we are learning about relationships.

We watch who makes the tea. Who drives. Who apologises. Who handles the money. Who organises Christmas. Whether our parents spend their evenings together. Whether they have separate friends. Whether they telephone one another throughout the day. Whether one waits while the other gets their hair done.

We absorb thousands of tiny behaviours without consciously deciding that they mean anything.

But over time, those behaviours can become associated with love.

If your father always accompanied your mother everywhere, you may never consciously formulate the belief that a loving husband wants to come everywhere with his wife.

But then you meet somebody who loves you deeply and says:

"Have a lovely time. I'll see you when you get home."

And something about it feels wrong.

Not necessarily because your partner has done anything wrong, but because the behaviour doesn't match the picture of love stored in your head.

That is the invisible benchmark.

And it can be remarkably powerful.

The person you fall in love with didn't grow up in your house

This is where things become more complicated.

You are bringing your frame of reference into the relationship.

Your partner is bringing theirs.

Perhaps you grew up with parents who were together for 40 years. Your partner's parents may have divorced when they were eight.

Perhaps affection in your house meant constant companionship. In theirs, love meant giving one another enormous independence.

Perhaps your parents talked through everything. Their family barely discussed feelings.

Perhaps your father showed love through presence. Their father showed it by working long hours and making sure everybody was provided for.

Perhaps your family treated marriage as two people becoming a unit. Their family placed much greater importance on remaining two independent individuals.

Then add everything that happened after childhood.

Previous relationships. Heartbreak. Culture. Personality. Attachment. Fear. Trauma. Expectations. Experiences of trust and betrayal. The things each person learnt they needed in order to feel safe.

Two people can therefore love one another enormously while carrying completely different internal definitions of what love is supposed to look like.

One person thinks:

"If you loved me, you'd want to come with me."

The other thinks:

"Of course I love you. That's why I don't need to come with you."

One experiences togetherness as security.

The other experiences autonomy as trust.

Neither necessarily loves more.

They simply arrived with different maps.

And if neither person realises that those maps exist, difference can very quickly start being interpreted as deficiency.

Independence becomes "emotional unavailability".

Wanting company becomes "neediness".

Wanting space becomes "lack of commitment".

Wanting to do everything together becomes "codependency".

Sometimes those descriptions may be accurate. But sometimes two perfectly reasonable people simply learnt different ways of being in relationships.

You may only know the version of your parents' marriage that you were allowed to see

There is another problem with using your parents' relationship as your benchmark.

You were their child, not a member of their marriage.

You saw a great deal, but you did not necessarily see everything.

You saw the routines. The family holidays. The affection. The arguments that happened in front of you. The way they interacted around the dinner table.

You probably did not witness every private negotiation, disappointment, compromise, resentment or sacrifice.

You may not know whether there were periods when one of them felt desperately lonely. You may not know about problems with sex, money, trust or intimacy. You may not know whether there were moments when somebody considered leaving.

There may have been compromises that worked beautifully for them but would make you miserable.

And, of course, there is another possibility that deserves to be said:

Perhaps their marriage really was as good as it looked.

Perhaps your parents genuinely are best friends. Perhaps your dad waited outside the hairdresser simply because he adored spending time with your mum. Perhaps after 40 years they would still choose exactly the same life again.

That still doesn't mean their marriage is reproducible.

Because the ingredients that created their relationship included two particular personalities, living through particular experiences, at a particular point in history.

You can admire the result without assuming you can recreate the recipe.

A 40-year marriage tells you how long it lasted — not how healthy it was

We also need to be careful about treating longevity itself as evidence of relationship success.

A 40-year marriage is unquestionably a long marriage.

It is not automatically a happy one.

Longevity does not necessarily equal intimacy.

Familiarity does not necessarily equal connection.

Staying does not always mean choosing.

Some people stay together for decades because they remain deeply in love.

Others stay because of children, religion, finances, social expectations, fear of starting again or because leaving simply never felt like an available option.

Many marriages probably contain elements of both: tremendous love alongside sacrifice, disappointment, compromise and periods of disconnection.

This matters because when we say, "I want what my parents had", there is a useful question to ask:

Do I actually know what they had, or do I know what their marriage looked like to me?

Familiar doesn't always mean healthy

There is also a more uncomfortable possibility.

Sometimes the behaviours we want to reproduce aren't behaviours we have consciously decided are healthy. They are simply familiar.

And familiarity is powerful.

If Dad always waited outside while Mum had her hair done, what did that behaviour actually represent?

Perhaps it was devotion.

Perhaps it was companionship.

Perhaps they simply liked being together.

But in another relationship, identical behaviour could come from insecurity, jealousy or control.

The behaviour itself tells us remarkably little without understanding what sits underneath it.

The same is true in reverse.

A couple spending Saturday afternoon separately might look disconnected to somebody raised by parents who did everything together.

But perhaps they have tremendous trust, rich individual lives and genuinely enjoy coming back together afterwards.

This is why copying the outward behaviour of a successful relationship cannot guarantee the substance of one.

Separate the values from the choreography

This is the useful distinction.

Take the values from your parents' marriage.

Commitment.

Loyalty.

Friendship.

Reliability.

Affection.

Showing up when life becomes difficult.

Making one another a priority.

Growing together rather than simply growing older beside one another.

Those can be wonderful standards.

But don't confuse the values with the choreography.

Your parents may spend virtually all their free time together.

You and your partner might thrive with separate hobbies and independent friendships.

Your parents might telephone one another five times during the working day.

Your partner might disappear into work for eight hours and come home delighted to see you.

Your father might never have taken a holiday without your mother.

Your marriage might work beautifully with girls' weekends, separate interests and plenty of space.

Different choreography does not necessarily mean different values.

The important question is not simply What did my parents do?

It is:

What did those behaviours mean to me?

Perhaps what you loved about your father waiting outside the hairdresser wasn't actually the waiting.

It was the message you took from it:

He wants to be near her.

Perhaps what you admired about your parents doing everything together wasn't literally that they were always together.

It was:

After all these years, they still genuinely enjoy one another's company.

Now you have identified the actual value.

And there may be hundreds of ways to create that feeling in your own relationship.

The danger of the invisible benchmark

The problem isn't wanting a stable, loving, long-term relationship.

The problem is an unexamined standard.

Because if the picture in your head says that a successful marriage looks like your parents' marriage, you can end up judging a perfectly good relationship against something it was never designed to be.

You may even overlook what is wonderful about your own relationship because you're concentrating on what it doesn't have.

Your partner doesn't behave like your father.

You don't have the dynamic your parents had.

You don't spend as much time together.

You argue differently.

You divide responsibilities differently.

You need more independence.

Your partner needs more space.

And suddenly different starts feeling like worse.

That is where the blueprint becomes dangerous.

You are no longer asking whether your relationship is loving, respectful, secure and fulfilling.

You are asking whether it resembles somebody else's.

Build the relationship with the person who is actually in front of you

There is a world of difference between saying:

"My dad always went everywhere with my mum. Why don't you ever want to come with me?"

and saying:

"One of the things I loved about my parents' relationship was how much they genuinely enjoyed spending time together. That feeling of companionship is important to me. How can we create more of that in our relationship?"

The first asks your partner to perform somebody else's role.

The second tells them what matters to you and invites them to help create it.

That is what adult relationships ultimately require.

Not two people perfectly reproducing what they saw growing up, but two people examining what they brought with them, deciding what they want to keep, discarding what doesn't serve them and negotiating something new.

Your parents gave you one model.

Your partner's parents gave them another.

Life has probably challenged both.

Now the two of you have to decide what belongs in yours.

Your parents' marriage can be inspiration without becoming expectation

So look at your parents after 40 years and think, I would love that.

Want the longevity.

Want the friendship.

Want somebody who still makes you laugh when you're old.

Want someone who knows how you take your tea and can tell from your face when something isn't quite right.

Want a relationship capable of surviving children, careers, grief, ageing, financial pressure, illness, boredom and thousands upon thousands of ordinary Tuesdays.

But don't become so attached to the way your parents expressed those things that you fail to recognise them when they arrive in another form.

Perhaps your husband won't sit outside the hairdresser.

Perhaps he'll kiss you goodbye, tell you to enjoy yourself, spend those two hours doing something he loves and have dinner waiting when you get home.

That isn't necessarily less love.

It is simply a different expression of it.

Your parents' marriage can give you a compass.

It shouldn't give you a script.

Because the aim isn't to successfully recreate somebody else's relationship.

It is to understand what you admired about it, understand the person standing in front of you, and build something that works for the two of you.

Something that takes account of your histories, your personalities, your needs, your wounds, your strengths and the life you are actually living.

Your parents built their marriage.

You have to build yours.