Adopted Adult Relationship Issues & How to Overcome Them
If you’re adopted, or you’re in a relationship with someone who was, you may be wondering how adoption affects relationships — from romantic partnerships to friendships to family.
As a board-certified couple and family psychologist, I’ve worked extensively with domestic and international adoptive families and adoptees. In this article, I want to share a bit of what tends to come up and how you can work through it.
Most of what follows speaks to romantic relationships, since that’s often where these questions feel most pressing. That said, the same patterns can surface across the board in different types of relationships. We’ll look at why adoption can shape relationships in adulthood, the challenges that come up most often, and what actually helps in working through them.
Why Adoption Can Affect Relationships in Adulthood
Adoption can affect adopted adults and relationships, but perhaps not quite the way you think. People often assume that being adopted automatically means certain challenges in relationships. But that’s not necessarily the case as it depends on a number of nuanced and unique aspects of the person, the families, and the relationships.
Here are a few important nuances influence adoptees:
Origin and adoption story - Where you were adopted from, where you live now, your birth origin story, and when in your life you were adopted all play a role. These details shape how an adoptee understands their own beginning, and that understanding can carry into how safe or uncertain they feel in close relationships.
Identity and self-understanding - The story you believe about yourself, how being adopted shapes your identity, and — if you aren't part of the majority race or culture around you — how your parents talked with you about that. These conversations shape how confidently you show up as yourself in a relationship.
Family relationships - The similarities and differences between you and your adoptive family, whether other children in the family were adopted, and how parents, siblings, and even extended family members treat one another. The dynamics you grew up watching often become the conscious or unconscious blueprint for what you expect from your own relationships.
All of this influences attachment and how a person feels about themselves, and therefore who they are in a romantic relationship and what they might need from one. However, we know from research that attachment shapes relationships for all of us, adopted or not. So it turns out that it’s less about being adopted and more about how secure the attachment is. This means adoptees can be just as happy and committed in their relationships as non-adopted adults.
Common Adopted Adult Relationship Issues
Common relationship issues for adopted adults look a lot like anyone’s relationship issues. But like all relationship problems, understanding them means appreciating the uniqueness of each member of the relationship and their relevant histories. These patterns aren’t unique to adoption, yet it’s worth considering the specifics since adopted men, women, and nonbinary folks can experience their own version of them.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common problems adopted adults may face in relationships:
Push-Pull Dynamics
Push-pull is when someone emotionally, psychologically, or behaviorally pushes a partner away or pulls them close as a way to regulate something in a relationship — usually anxiety, closeness, conflict, or a sense of safety.
This can take a few forms:
One person might do both, pushing away at times and pulling close at others
Both people might participate in the push-pull dynamic
One person might be the consistent pusher while the other is the consistent puller — the classic pursuer-withdrawer pattern
For example, things might be going well in your relationship, then one partner seemingly starts a fight over something small, goes quiet, or gets busy and distant right when the relationship feels closest. Their partner, sensing the distance, leans in harder by texting more, asking what’s wrong, or otherwise trying to close the gap. The more one pulls, the more the other pushes, and the cycle feeds itself. This often happens unconsciously, where you don’t actually realize it’s happening in the moment.
For an adopted person, this can make a particular kind of sense. If closeness once came alongside loss, then getting close as an adult can activate the fear of losing it again. Pushing a partner away can be a way to feel in control of the distance — I’ll leave before I’m left — while pulling them close can be a way to reassure themselves that the person is still there.
Fear of Abandonment or Rejection
A fear of abandonment or rejection might seem obvious for an adopted person, and the reasons run deep. Depending on the origin story, an adopted person may actually have been left — at a fire station, in an orphanage, or through circumstances they’ll never fully know. This early separation can leave a lasting sense of having been rejected. But it doesn’t always require a dramatic story. You might not know your story at all, or might know it and find it was gentler than other scenarios, and still carry the fear.
How you were raised matters too: how mentally well and securely attached your adoptive parents were, and how accepted or not you felt growing up is all relevant. As a likely result, research shows that adopted women are more likely to have insecure attachment styles.
For example, you may worry that a partner is always on the verge of leaving or you may hit an ordinary conflict and brace for it to end the whole relationship when it’s just a disagreement and not a relationship-ender. This can also look like feeling as though there are parts of yourself that have to be hidden because someone might reject them, or even parts you’re rejecting within yourself.
There’s a common thread here: if your earliest experience of connection came with loss or the belief that you weren’t wanted, then closeness as an adult can have a deep root of this could be taken away. The fear isn’t necessarily due to an actual flaw in the relationship (although it could be), it’s a protective mechanism doing its best to anticipate possible loss. However, adopted adults are just as likely to be in relationships as anyone else, and research finds their relationships are often marginally higher in quality.
People-Pleasing
At its core, people-pleasing is a way of coping with fear, rejection, or the actual experience of it. It’s the habit of setting yourself aside or reshaping yourself to come across as pleasing, acceptable, worthy, or valuable to someone else.
Another way to understand how people pleasing might show up in your relationship is as an attempt to control your partner’s perception of you. It usually grows out of a fear of abandonment or rejection, but it carries a kind of irony that in working so hard to be accepted, you can end up hiding the very self you're hoping will be loved. Over time, this can stop feeling like a choice and start feeling like a personality — the accommodating one, the easy one, the one who never needs much.
For example, you might automatically agree with your partner’s opinion before you’ve checked what you actually think or say yes to plans you don’t want in order to avoid the risk of disappointing them. It can look like over-apologizing, over-giving, or staying endlessly flexible while never quite naming a preference of your own. Sometimes it looks like being the perfect partner on the surface, while a low-grade resentment builds underneath because needs that never get spoken never get met.
The same thread runs through each of those patterns: if being yourself once felt too risky, or if love seemed conditional on being good, easy, or wanted, then shrinking to fit can feel like the safest way to keep someone close. These can be core beliefs of an adopted adult, which might cause relationship issues.
Beyond Romantic Relationships
How adopted men, women, or non-binary folks feel in their relationships beyond romantic partnership or marriage is equally important, if not more so. We rely on all kinds of relationships to have holistically fulfilling lives. Every one of them influences who we believe ourselves to be in the world and how we function in it.
So the patterns above are worth noticing wherever they show up:
Friendships - Closeness, trust, and the fear of being left can play out just as they do with a partner
Relationships with adoptive family - The ongoing work of belonging in a family you joined rather than were born into
Relationships with birth family (if reunited) - A reunion can bring its own version of hope, fear, and testing, as can it if reunion isn’t possible
Relationships with peers - The everyday sense of fitting in, or not, among people you’re supposed to be like
Relationship with colleagues - People-pleasing in particular can look like being the agreeable one, the tireless one, the one who never says no
Relationships with your own children, if you’re a parent - If you’re a parent, questions about family, belonging, and origin often resurface
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How to Overcome Adopted Adult Relationship Issues
If you have relationship issues connected to being adopted, there are ways to work through them and to build lasting, satisfying relationships.
Make sure it’s actually about being adopted - You might be telling yourself you have this issue because you were adopted. But what if it isn’t about that at all, and you’d be struggling with it regardless? Getting the narrative accurate matters because you can’t work on the right thing until you’ve named the right thing.
Consider the reverse - Sometimes we treat something as a garden-variety relationship issue when adoption is what’s actually informing it. Noticing that nuance can be both freeing and clarifying because it changes what you’re looking at and what you do about it.
Get clear about the issue and name it directly - Say it out loud to the person you’re in the relationship with, and work through it together. Open up a conversation about how adoption shapes your experience, and talk with them about what you need in order to feel trust and safety.
Know that attachment isn’t fixed - The patterns you built early aren’t a life sentence. Attachment can shift over time through relationships that feel safe and consistent and through the work of noticing your patterns as they happen.
Get to know your own story - Whether or not that includes searching or reunion, having some relationship with your origin story — even the parts that are unknown — can change how it lives in you.
Seek therapy - An individual or relationship therapist with real experience in adoption understands the nuance and complexity of your situation and can give you tools to work with.
Adopted Adult Relationship Issues: FAQs
Do adopted people struggle with relationships?
Adopted people struggle with relationships, and non-adopted people struggle with relationships. What matters is clarifying whether the struggle is actually related to being adopted or not, which is easy to confuse.
Do adoptees have low self-esteem?
It’s a myth that adoptees struggle with self-esteem more than non-adoptees. Research comparing nearly 11,000 adopted with non-adopted peers across 88 studies found no difference in self-esteem for domestic, international, and transracial adoptees alike.
How does adoption affect adults?
How adoption affects adults depends on the adult, the family that adopted them, the family they were adopted from, where and how they live, and many other factors. There’s no single answer here, and it comes down to each person understanding their own nuance.
What is the most common attachment style for adoptees?
There is no most common attachment style for adoptees any more than there is for non-adopted people. You might assume it’s insecure, but it really depends as many non-adopted people are insecurely attached, too. What’s more useful than picking a label is understanding that attachment is fluid. It depends, it changes over time, and it can look different from one relationship to the next.
Adopted Adult Relationship Issues: Next Steps
Adopted people struggle with relationships, and so do non-adopted people. What matters is appreciating the uniqueness of each person in the relationship and their relevant histories. It’s also important to get clear about whether the struggle is actually related to being adopted or not.
No relationship problem is fixed, and attachment can shift over time. Adoptees can be just as happy and committed in their relationships as non-adoptees, if not more as they seek to understand what relationships mean to them on an even deeper level as a result of their story.
If you’re ready to work through what’s showing up in your relationships, I’d love to chat. I understand the nuance and complexity of adoption and would be happy to help you work through these dynamics. Send me a message here — and I'll be in touch soon.