who’s your mommy?
reparenting, individuation, etc
Ava
Nov 02, 2026
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Home From Camp,
1976, Norman Rockwell
I am closing the
matchmaking
form tomorrow night!
I saw a
Tiktok
this morning that claimed “romantic relationships are the easiest relationships unless you are secretly treating your partner like your parent.” He goes on to explain that most people are out looking for a parent instead of a partner. It’s something that I’ve been part of on both sides, and something that I see people doing literally every day. I’ve been thinking about it in one or another since I read the books
Mother Hunger
and
The Fantasy Bond
.
1
Both are books about how as adults we desperate try to replicate the love we wished for as kids. Kelly McDaniel: “The term Mother Hunger captures a compelling, insatiable yearning for love—the sort of love we dream about but can’t find. Many of us mistake Mother Hunger for a craving for romantic love. But in truth, we are longing for the love we didn’t receive during our formative moments, months, and years.”
In the past couple of years, I’ve really come to understand how when I thought I was looking for the experience of romantic love, I was actually looking for the experience of completion. As in: expecting another human being to provide the all-consuming, regulating love that a parent provides a child. My journey with this is pretty well summarized by these two tweets:
dererererek
@
dererererek4
Sorry to say this but you’re probably desiring and ruminating about women outside of ur objectively pretty nice relationship that you thought would be the special thing because you found out your partner can’t be your mommy/daddy and love you unconditionally and give you a…
2:54 PM · Oct 31, 2026
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Ava
@
noampomsky
for a long time I always tried to create the perfect surrogate parent experience for partners and friends (nonjudgmental, unconditionally loving, attuned) and looked for it for myself but it actually creates a lot of problems bc in the transactional analysis sense they’re always…
dererererek
@
dererererek4
Sorry to say this but you’re probably desiring and ruminating about women outside of ur objectively pretty nice relationship that you thought would be the special thing because you found out your partner can’t be your mommy/daddy and love you unconditionally and give you a
4:39 PM · Oct 31, 2026
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62.4K
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The problem with parenting your partner or expecting your partner to parent you is that you are two adult human beings in a voluntary romantic relationship, and neither of you in fact totally responsible for the other’s welfare. So if your assumption is that your partner will act like your parent, you’re in for a rude awakening, because at some point you’re going to realize:
Oh my god. This person is
not
in fact acting like my mom
. And this can feel like a huge letdown. Years ago I was in a version of this dynamic where for complicated reasons I had decided to take it upon myself to behave like my partner’s surrogate parent. You could say I was trying to provide the
IPF
(Ideal Parent Figure) protocol experience. This usually consists of five caregiving components:
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