“Why can’t we eat dinner at the table more often?”
“Are we going to your parents’ or mine for Christmas this year?”
“I don’t think the way we’re discipling the kids is really working that well. Do you?”
In Chapter 6 of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I wrote, “As you age, the path of least resistance when it comes to dealing with a troubling situation is to simply follow the scripts you know so well.” You pull scripts from a huge number of sources, but your earliest scripts come from the earliest times in your life: from your primary caregivers, i.e. your parents, or whoever was responsible for raising you.
When presented with a problem, your mind quickly follows the path of least resistance toward solving that problem. More often than we’d care to admit, that path leads directly back to how your parents modeled life for you.
Whether or not you eat at the table as a family may be directly related to the dinner routine of your childhood.
Feeling pressured to always go to your parents’ house for Christmas may be directly related to childhood memories of what Christmas is supposed to be like.
And how you discipline your own children (or not) may very well be how you were disciplined (or not).
But the path of least resistance ends when you enter into a committed relationship with someone else. Why?
Because their path of least resistance began in a place very different from yours.
And learning to understand that subtle yet significant aspect can be the difference between a marriage of distant roommates and a marriage of deep connection.
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