240 - What Our Parents Taught Us About Love

Register here for the upcoming free workshop on May 12, The Real Work of Dating with Disability: What No One Else Is Teaching. I'll be reviewing how to use a skill set approach to dating with a disability. The workshop will be geared toward  professionals but anyone is welcome to join.

Today will be more of a personal episode as the day this podcast publishes, is my parents' 75th wedding anniversary. Now they have both been gone for several years and I'm sure they're having a heavenly celebration. But the milestone of 75 years has given me pause to reflect on how we desire or certainly not desire certain relationships based on what we see in our parents' relationship.

A Love That Lasted 65 Years

My parents were married 65 years when my father died. That is such an unfathomable amount of time for most of us to be committed to just one person. Yet when my dad passed, my mother in her grieving process said to me, "I just wanted more time with him." Can you imagine?

In reality, though, my parents had a genuinely happy marriage and just really liked being with the other. I remember growing up having a friend comment that my parents did everything together. Except dad was an avid hunter and mom drew the line there. 😉

Why I'm So Passionate About Relationships

I'm sharing all this because sometimes when I'm deep in creating resources to help people with dating and relationships or doing another live video on why relationships matter for people with disabilities or preparing a talk on it, I pause and think, is my passion about people finding love abnormal? Seriously I wonder at times. Then I remember most people who can completely nerd out on their work have these moments of doubt and it's totally normal.

How Our Parents Shape What We Want

I think for better or worse, our parents' relationship influences a great deal of our desire for our own intimate relationships. Maybe if your parents had a bad relationship, you learned what you don't want from your primary relationship. Maybe your parents' relationship caused you to be very hesitant to commit to one person.

If you're someone like me who grew up with a model of a loving relationship between my parents, maybe the respect, nurturing, and friendship you witnessed planted the seed of desire for a similar kind of loving intimacy in your life. I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about it. Ask yourself, whether it's with the intention to not replicate what you saw in your parents' relationship but attract the goodness and healthy qualities you saw and felt into your own life. That, my friend, I believe is your heart calling you to what you know you deserve.

If you're someone who definitely doesn't want what your parents had in their relationship, honor it. That's telling you something vital that you need to listen to as well, that you want better for yourself.

Check out my instagram to see a photo of my parents in 1951 on their wedding day.

Coming Up Next Week

Thank you for letting me share a more personal message with you today. I hope it resonated. Next week on the show we're going to have one of my favorite topics. I'm interviewing a couple who have been married 26 years and we'll talk about love, commitment, and disability.