Real role models
3 love lessons I learned from my parents
© Dragon Images / Shutterstock
What love means to us in detail is mainly determined by our experiences and observations. In the case of our author, for example, the relationship between her parents has had a significant impact on her image of love.
As a child, I hardly ever thought about my parents’ relationship or questioned what connected them and how they felt about each other. I wasn’t particularly interested in her story either, like how she met her and how they got together. Now that I’m more mature and reflective (I think!), I realize that my parents shaped my idea of love in a big way – and are responsible for my believing from the bottom of my heart that true love exists.
3 love lessons I learned from my parents
1. Love knows no rules
With my parents, almost everything came together that, according to experts, should not come together if you want to have a long, happy relationship:
- My mother was the first woman my father was really in love with – and they say you have to love twice before you’re ready for lifelong love.
- My parents are very different in terms of, for example, their level of education, their beliefs, their interests, their strategies for dealing with conflicts, etc. – and it is said that the more similar one is in these points, the better and more promising for the relationship.
- My parents’ relationship grew out of what was initially a secret affair – and they say affairs are usually just affairs.
According to statistics, my parents should have separated after a maximum of a few years together, but in fact they were together for almost 40 years and inseparable – until my dad died in 2017. What I learn from it: If your feeling says it’s right and fits, nothing else matters.
2. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, as long as it works
Before I was born, my parents certainly had a very romantic time – at least that’s what old letters and photos from back then show. But the far greater part of their relationship, the almost 30 years that I’ve noticed, seemed – well – not exactly instagramable, you could say. For example, my parents hardly ever went on dates or put us kids up somewhere so they could have some alone time. My father often went to the beach alone in the summer, and we occasionally flew on vacations without him while he was working.
roses? Romance? Passion? I didn’t get much of it as a kid. My parents didn’t even wear wedding rings. They had their rituals for that, for example they always played together, watched certain programs on television or something similar. On special occasions like birthdays and Mother’s Day, my father would bring my mother flowers he had picked – preferably daisies, her favorite flowers. And my mother cooked him his favorite meal. It was little things that meant something to the two, with which they made each other happy and showed their love. Apparently, my parents didn’t need big, romantic gestures or gifts like you know them from films and series.
3. Those who love each other would rather go through hell together than through paradise alone
Unfortunately, retirement didn’t go as planned for my parents: Immediately after my father sold his medical practice to enjoy his retirement, he fell ill. As a result, all their dreams and plans – traveling together, maybe living somewhere nice every six months – came to naught. Instead, they went through some very difficult times, but it only made them bond even more. To be honest, at first I took it for granted that my mother would stay with my father and take care of him.
But when I look around I realize it’s not. I know so many couples who broke up when one partner was having a hard time and the other had to step back. The man is suddenly in a wheelchair due to an accident, so his partner leaves him in the nursing home and lives alone in the house they share. Another has to take care of his dependent parents, so his girlfriend packs her things and finds someone else. My parents would never have let each other down, they always stuck together. And at the latest when I experienced how my mother cried when my father died, I also understood why.