And how does it impact your marriage?
For most of us, the answer often leads to one phrase: original family. The first relationships we form are with our family, and the quality of those relationships often plays a significant role in determining whether we live a happy life.
As psychologist Frank Kadler once said:
“The greatest misfortune in life is that our first major hardship often comes from our family, and this hardship can be inherited.”
Faced with this inheritance, how many of us unconsciously accept and pass it on to our new families, to our children?
1. You Don’t Understand Love, and You Fear It
“Do you love me?”
This question is frequently asked between partners. The one asking seeks reassurance, while the one hearing it often feels like fleeing. This pattern repeats—a relentless cycle of seeking and evading.
Why does one ask? Because they’re afraid. They feel insecure in the relationship and need constant reassurance to feel safe.
Why does the other evade? Because they don’t know how to love. From an early age, they didn’t receive love, and one cannot give what they don’t possess.
Love is like a savings account—something we acquire and nurture over time. It’s a learned ability, and a person can’t give what they’ve never had.
Marriages like this often lay the foundation for yet another unhappy union. For this reason, many people choose solitude, distancing themselves from the complexities of love and marriage.
Take, for example, the Hong Kong Film Award-winning actress Chun Xia. She has made such a choice—she avoids love because she’s afraid of it.
Perhaps you don’t know her or the magnitude of her accomplishments, but when you witness her bewildered and anxious reaction to unexpected praise, you may see a reflection of yourself in her unease and disbelief.
This avoidance of love is a legacy of past hardships—an echo of the relationships we inherited and struggled with from the very beginning.
2. Longing for Love but Always Losing It
Many people, unwilling to endure the endless conflicts of their original family, choose to escape early, seeking refuge in what they believe will be a new, safe, and loving family.
Leaving their parents behind, they build their own marriage, hoping to find in their partner the love and emotional security they lacked growing up.
But how many enter these new marriages with high hopes, vowing never to repeat their parents’ mistakes, only to unknowingly become a reflection of the very life they tried to escape?
Carrying the wounds of the past, they enter this new chapter expecting love to heal them, yet find themselves replaying the same patterns they promised to break. The cycle of longing and losing continues, as the legacy of unresolved pain shapes their reality once more.