How to Find Out What Might Happen With a New Partner

When a new relationship is on the cards, as we chat over supper or go on a walk, we might greatly expand our sense of what could subsequently happen with our date by turning to one subject in particular: by asking them more about their relationship with the parent of the gender they are attracted to.

Did they get on with dad? Was mum around? Were they at ease with them? Did they feel loved? How much could they trust them? How much honesty was possible?

What we would be trying to do thereby is to determine the tenor and form of what psychotherapists call, in technical language, the other’s ‘negative transference.’ We’d be finding out what happened to them in their past to help us forecast some of what they might presume of our intentions in the future.

Transference is the ungainly term used by psychotherapists to refer to patterns of expectation that are formed in childhood around parental figures and which are then typically layered – or projected – onto friends, colleagues and lovers in the present, sadly in ways that we can’t easily track and that can lead to some unnecessarily painful conflicts and self-defeating behaviours. 

We are all prone to negative transferences not because we are individually deficient but because, until we have unpicked our histories, we will automatically use our childhoods as guides to our adulthoods, without noticing how much we may thereby be disregarding the actions and words of the often very different and frequently far less blameworthy people in front of us.

Under the sway of a negative transference, an unreliable mother may inspire a suspicion that any woman we are close to is likely to betray us. Or an angry father may breed an apprehension that rage and punitive condemnation will be around the corner with every man we might be with. 

If there was a parent who offered our partner love only in return for scholarly achievement, we may expect that at some point – it could be a year from now – we could run into accusations from them that we only care about their salary or simply want to show them off to our friends. If our partner harbours fury at their parent for the way they ignored them in favour of a younger sibling, we could be closely monitored for signs of interest in new acquaintances.

When negative transferences are at play, the facts on the ground cease to be decisive; it’s what we fear will happen that dominates our reading of reality. And in a particularly painful and ironic twist, downbeat presumptions may bring about the very scenarios one dreads. Being aggressively accused of wanting to have an affair can eventually drive the most innocent person in the direction of having one. Being repeatedly accused of withdrawing emotionally can finally lead even a mature person to pull away. 

Because it is never just one member of the couple who carries negative transferences, we need to be as curious about our own distortions as about the other’s and as ready to admit to the possibility of unfair accusations and aggression. We need to meditate on a set of simple questions:

— What might my mother’s behaviour have taught me to expect of women?

— How did what happened around my father shape what I believe of men?

— And what might I, as a result, be getting wrong?

The mood between a couple over this issue should be filled with humour and compassion. Of course we will both be, at points, shockingly deluded as to what is unfolding but the more we can accept our proclivities without shame, the less self-righteous or brittle we need to be when they manifest themselves.

The hallmark of a functioning relationship should be bravery on those frequent delicate occasions when we might just have to smile in wry acknowledgement at the apparently playful but deep down supremely important and thought-provoking suggestion that: This is perhaps more about your mother or father than about me…