Generally, do you get along better with your parent of the same or opposite gender?
If there is a difference, it would be appreciated if you were willing to share the reason(s).
If they’re dead, please answer according to how you felt for most of their lives.
I would say I got along with both of them about equally. I had more conflict with my mother but I also interacted with her more. The relationships between the two were very different. Father was about work and sports mother was about everything else.
Me and my dad have a relationship again, now that my mom is dead. Make of that what you will.
Would it be safe to assume the fifth option is mainly equal?
Equal or “it’s complicated” or “too difficult to choose a previous option me explain in the comments” etc.
“Man: I get along better with the same gender parent.”
They’re both long gone from my life, fortunately, but I answer for the distant past. My mother had a sexually inappropriate relationship with me, whereas my father was mostly just absent. This is stronger than just a matter of taste or preference. It was bad. People died.
I generally get on better with my father, he’s a bit more easy-going in character.
I answered fifth option, but I almost answered “Woman: I get along better with the opposite gender parent.”
Explanation: I unmistakably get along with my father better than my brother or sister do. Also, a decade ago, my brother and sister unmistakably got along with my mother better than my father, and I had the least close relationship with my mother out of the three of us. But since my mother’s been dead for the last decade, I really don’t know what my relationship with her would have been if she were still alive, or how my relationship with my father would be if my mother had stayed alive.
I’m intrigued to see the results of this poll!
So far, it’s going in the same direction as my (unstated in the OP) hypothesis.
Another fifth option person. I’m kinda weird in the gender department (see prior threads) so I don’t precisely consider myself to be of the same gender as either of my parents. I feel like I understand my mom better, and vice versa, although my dad has been the more involved and emotionally attentive parent most of my life. (Not that she’s horribly detached and distant or anything, he just really put himself into it). I have some specific personality traits where I’m far more like my dad than my mom: we’re both stubborn and will embrace an idea and then run headlong into social tension without flinching (much) whereas my mom is much more low-key about confrontational stuff if she’s in a position where she’s doing something that some folks might not approve of. (And she does such things for pragmatic reasons, when she does them, not for abstract principles, most of the time).
Sorry, I’m babbling.
I answered 5th option because I get along with them equally. I probably have a stronger bond with my father through sports just doing more stuff together, but I get along with my mother just as well.
I get along with them differently, but equally. My mother and I tend to have more spirited debates which often end in us shouting over one another, but I love it, and I’m pretty sure she does too. There’s practically never any hard feelings about it. My father and I have a more mellow relationship, based more on inside jokes and quieter conversation, so it may look more amicable, but it lacks the (for lack of a better word) passion of my maternal relationship. I’d say I love them both the same, though.
I’m female, btw.
Small Hen,
What do the debates tend to be about? Do the most spirited/shouty debates tend to be about a particular set of topics?
I voted for the fifth option - my father died many years ago and although we had a good relationship, I have no idea what kind of relationship we would have had as adults rather than as parent and child. I have a very good relationship with my mother, we have never really had any major problems between us at all. Can’t say the same for my brother, he’s just an all round git.
My mother’s a deeply conservative Southern Baptist. I’m a (relatively) liberal minded atheist. Our debates tend to be a mix of the political and the religious. It works because we keep it to the hypothetical, and I don’t use the A-word in relation to myself. Everyone’s happier that way.
Before I came out to them, I got along better with my father, afterward it was my mother. Dad pushed me away, mom stood up for me. He mellowed over time but it was never the same.
I got along better with my father. We were very much alike in personality and had similar interets. My mother had wanted a ballerina and got an athlete. She worked hard to bend me to her will and I worked equally hard to avoid it. It was all very civilized and probably invisible to outsiders, but that contest of wills continued for years. And when my father died, my mother basically just checked out of ‘real life’ for a dozen years or so, leaving me to handle the finances, house maintenance, etc. I was all of 13. I resented it mightily. When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, we buried the hatchet and enjoyed that last 18 months. I am forever grateful for that. But we were still not people who would have sought one another out as friends had we not been family.
I am a woman.
I haven’t spoken to my father in 13 years. He is a truly terrible and toxic person - but I respect that he is a musical and intellectual genius.
My relationship with my mother was very rocky as a late teen, but now has solidified into a strong friendship. I do not really consider her a mother figure, however. More like ‘good friends’.
I like my step father, but don’t really take him seriously. He lies often to make himself seem important, and has no backbone or self-restraint. But, as I said, I like him - he’s very sweet generally and nurtured my creativity growing up.
Interesting, mother, father, and fifth option are getting equal votes - 15, 13, & 15.
I’d be interested in see how the numbers worker out based on age.
I love both my parents very much, but whenever I’m annoyed at one of them, it tends to by my mother. Still, the difference is negligible.