For a partnership to succeed, the partners need to carefully reevaluate the values and the patterns that they’ve inherited from their families and exchange some of them for ones that are better for the partnership. While doing this, both families must be respected even when they don’t meet the other’s standards. For example, if they do not belong to the same religion, it’s much easier today than formerly for them to respect both families and to combine their confessions on a new level, perhaps by joining a different faith or by becoming active in a social service.

An image portrays this process: Two people are standing on opposite banks of a river. If they simply call out to one another, “This is my position,” nothing changes, and the river continues to flow by, indifferent to their shouts. If they want to know the love that’s possible to equal partners, they both have to get into the river and allow themselves to be carried by the current. Only then can they come together, feel the river’s force, and know what life offers and demands.

When people have been hurt or damaged in their relationship with their original family, they carry that hurt and suspicion into the new partnership. They can’t avoid bringing their old system into the new one. In fact, unresolved attachments to the family of origin are a major cause of difficulty in relationships.

– Bert Hellinger in Love’s Hidden Symmetry
(emphasis mine – yi)