Your mom might be responsible for the way your skin tans, or doesn’t, the size of your boobs and your love or loathing of reading, but it turns out she might also be to blame for your latest breakup.
A new study published in PLOS ONE found that things like how many partners you live with and how successful your relationships are might all come down to your mother.
Claire Kamp Dush, lead author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State University, said: “Our results suggest that mothers may have certain characteristics that make them more or less desirable on the marriage market and better or worse at relationships.”
Mothers and their biological children were followed for a minimum of 24 years. The study tracked 7,152 people, who were asked questions about marriages and divorces, as well as cohabitations and dissolutions of non-marriage relationships.
There has been lots of research on marriage and divorce but very little on non-marriage relationships. This study shed light on dating and living with people as well as marrying them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the research found that mothers pass both their own problems (which may make them more or less likely to sustain a relationship) and the way they deal with those relationships on to their kids.
“What our results suggest is that mothers may pass on their marriageable characteristics and relationship skills to their children — for better or worse,” Kamp Dush said.
“It could be that mothers who have more partners don’t have great relationship skills, or don’t deal with conflict well, or have mental health problems, each of which can undermine relationships and lead to instability. Whatever the exact mechanisms, they may pass these characteristics on to their children, making their children’s relationships less stable.”