Mothers: For centuries their children have deified and demonized them.
Now, in recent weeks, a new motion picture comedy, with mother-child psychology at its core, once again begs a very large question:For good or bad, how much do mothers affect their children's romantic attachments?
Do men choose women like their mothers or just the opposite? Do daughters choose men to intentionally upset their mothers or to please them? Are moms really that powerful?
The makers of the movie "Mother," of course, would have one believe mothers have a tremendous influence on their children's romantic lives.
In the film, actor Albert Brooks plays a fortysomething man fresh from his second divorce. Realizing he's never been able to sustain a lasting romantic relationship, he decides in pat Freudian fashion that his problems lie with his mom (played by Debbie Reynolds) and their restive relationship.
"Doug," a friend tells Brooks' character, "all the girls you've ever gone out with are the same woman."
The implication: They're all his mom.
So Brooks' character moves back home, refits his boyhood room, pins up his old "Barbarella" and Carlos Santana posters and - in hopes of a sunnier future - explores the woman who molded him.
But what makes for good comedy, experts insist, doesn't always make for good psychology.
Fact is, Sigmund Freud's theories of mother/father/parental influences are more than 100 years old, but psychiatrists concede that the exact role parents play in influencing their children's romantic lives - their successes and failures, who they choose and who they don't - remains as complex and individual as individuals themselves.
Most psychiatrists say mothers are all-important in a child's romantic development. At the same time they also maintain that although mother-love or mother-hate or mother-anger/resentment/support/caring/whatever is vital, bashing moms for a crummy relationship is too easy. Genetics, upbringing, environment, culture, temperament, birth order, physical appearance, social status, not to mention the absence or presence of the other oft-forgotten parent - dear ol' dad - all play a role.
Virtually everyone knows someone who married a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad. Same with husbands. But just as many know people who didn't.
And although it is not uncommon for the children of abuse to later get involved in their own adult abusive relationships, abuse-begetting-abuse isn't the rule.
In truth, experts said, how it all works remains as mysterious as attraction. Which isn't to say, however, that opinions don't abound.
Consider just a few:
Joel Yager, psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine:
"Basically, you could say that men marry women for two reasons: One is because they're like their mothers and the other is because they're not," he said. "But the more we know, the more we know its more complicated than that. To come up with a formula that says you are going to marry your mother or not marry your mother is far too simplistic."
Variations in the kinds of men and women siblings marry is often tremendous.
Although mom is undoubtedly influential, Yager said, a mother's influence is just one ingredient in a bubbling soup of influences, not the least of which is one's own choices.
Psychotherapist Rick Brown, executive director of the Institute of Imago Relationship Therapy in Winter Park, Fla.:
"Old therapy used to say that men look for the mothers they never had. And girls look for the fathers they never had," he said. "But what we're finding instead is that you actually choose, unconsciously - nobody does this on purpose - a partner who has the positive and negative traits of your caretakers, plural."
Imago Relationship Therapy, Brown said, is based on the notion that in the first years of life, children unconsciously imprint an "image" of the emotional experiences they've had with their caretakers. For good and bad, that imprinted image is the blueprint for later relationships.
"If mom was nurturing and dependable and dad was emotionally unavailable, then we are drawn into a relationship in which we eventually find the person we have chosen - after the romance has worn off - to be dependable like mom but emotionally unavailable like dad," Brown said.
It's one reason, Brown thinks, children from abusive families quite often are drawn into abusive adult relationships. Unconsciously, he said, men and women are drawn to the parental blueprint.
Emory University psychiatrist David Davis, director of the Piedmont Psychiatric Clinic in Atlanta:
"There are three things that are going to have the most impact on the partners you choose. First is genetics. Second is your mother. Third is the relationship that your parents had with each other. The fourth one is probably your father - that's because typically he's more in the workplace and not there as much in the developmental years."
When it comes to attractions, all animals are programmed differently, Davis said. Eagles aren't attracted to sparrows. Sparrows aren't attracted to owls. That's genetics. Likewise, he said, not all men and women are attracted to the same people. That's genetics, too, Davis said. He believes it accounts for a tremendous amount of our romantic attachments.
Mothers, meantime, typically are the first people with whom children form emotional attachments. Their influence, Davis said, is incredibly complex.
"What our mothers give us is very important to what kind of people we are attracted to, but how our mothers relate to us is 90 percent unconscious," he said.
Who we're attracted to, he said, depends greatly on the vast range of emotional needs our mothers (or fathers, if they're the primary caregiver) do and don't meet. If unconsciously we feel we lack validation, we might look for someone to validate us.
Edward W. Beal, clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, author of "Adult Children of Divorce":
"There are people in Canada who did a study of men and women applying for marriage certificates, and they asked them to describe their spouses," he said. "Most people characterized their spouses more like their mothers than anyone else."
Scientific? Beal said he's not sure. Whatever influence mothers alone may have, he said, the influence of the mother-father pair - together or apart - is also profound. But again complex.
Studies, for example, show that children of divorce, especially daughters, are more apt to cohabit. They also tend to have higher rates of divorce than their parents. It's unclear, Beal said, if that's because the children of divorce are more anxious about long-term commitments or because they're more comfortable with divorce as an option.
"Some say that because they saw their mothers handle it (divorce) successfully, they felt they could do it more easily," Beal said.
And what of the mother-father relationship?
In one instance, children who see their parents married, but constantly battling, may intentionally steer away from marriage. Others, meantime, may embrace marriage, hoping to create the happy home they didn't have.
Depending on their parents' relationship, some children of divorce may grow to deeply resent men or women. Others may not.
"It is not just whether someone is divorced or single," Beal said. "It's the way they do it."
Confused? Well, that's reality.
Do mothers affect the romantic relationships their children later develop?
Sure. And the sun helps plants grow.
But some thrive in the shade. Some thrive in the heat. Some wilt from neglect, others from overhandling. Problem is, people - unlike plants - are far more unpredictable.
"People crave explanations where there aren't any and formulas where there aren't any," said Yager of New Mexico. "But for anybody to have the idea that everything is determined by your relationship with your mother is baloney. It's simple enough to make a good Hollywood movie but too simple for life."