A Guide to the Best of Southern California : RELATING : Mothers and Sons

On this Mother’s Day, after the perfume and the bath salts and the aprons have been opened and the wrappings discarded, mothers and sons (and fathers and daughters and wives and husbands) might want to take this short quiz.

True or false:

A man with a loving mom will make a great husband, but beware of the guy with an ice maiden for a mother.

True, some wives might say. And a new study supports that answer.

Researchers Lynn Carol Miller of USC and Linda Lee Cooke of Claremont Graduate School looked at how parent-child relationships affect a child’s future marriage.

They interviewed 43 couples, most in their mid-20s, who had been married an average of seven months; a year later, 23 of those couples completed a second round of research.

The study found that adults who perceive their parents as cold, rejecting or ambivalent will have a tougher time finding--or giving--marital bliss than those who see their parents as warm, loving and responsive.

Men in particular, the study found, tend to interpret their wives’ behavior on the basis of their relationships with their mothers--no matter what their wives were really trying to do.

To put it mildly, such behavior could be disconcerting to an unsuspecting wife.

“The impact of this study, if any,” Miller says, “is that people should be more aware of why they engage in certain behaviors toward their spouses. And that perhaps all of us ought to think about what kind of baggage we carry into a marriage, how that baggage influences how we respond to our mates.”