MarriageTweets

via Micah Toub: I’m coming around to thinking my father isn’t a complete failure in relationships. This isn’t an easy idea to embrace given his two divorces and series of between-marriage girlfriends that didn’t work out (including that one who busted into our house during my summer vacation and scattered his torn-up love letters on the carpet). But now that I’m older, and have gone through my own series of relationships, including one divorce, I’m looking back and thinking I may have judged my father too harshly. And I wonder, can I learn lessons from his mistakes without taking the avoid-becoming-those-things-I-abhor-in-him-at-all-costs attitude? According to Geraldine Piorkowski, a clinical psychologist and author of Adult Children of Divorce: Confused Love Seekers , we can indeed shoot ourselves in the foot if we overreact to the qualities we think make our dads bad at love. “Negative models are often extreme,” Dr. Piorkowski says. “So, for example, if your father used to be a very angry man, you’ll tend to blame yourself for even normal anger. You limit your repertoire, whereas the healthy individual has a wide range of responses.” Dr. Piorkowski says a person in that kind of situation may try to be a “superkind Superman,” but instead end up being an emotionally two-dimensional “robot.”