Birth Order: The Relationship Expert

MAGGAY, NERISSA

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Birth Order: The Relationship Expert

Are you an uptight person or a risk taker? A perfectionist and a planner? Or you just feel alone and alienated most of the time? In whatever birth order we fell in, it will always play a big role in developing our personality and how we handle relationships. According to William Cane author of the ‘The Birth Order Book of Love’, our personality is directly related to how we interact with other people.

Each level of the birth order hierarchy has unique traits that most researchers agreed on to. The birth order effects are usually derived from the unspoken competition between siblings as they fight for a family niche. It’s like all of them fight for the attention they think they deserve.

These type of children tend to be dominant and controlling when it comes to relationships. There are two types of first borns: the compliant and the aggressive. The complaints are those who are the caregivers, crowd pleasers, a team player and of course reliable while the aggressive ones are the natural leaders, perfectionists, controlling they want things to be done their way.

The Middles and the later borns are the type “O” of the relationships. They are often characterized as the rebel of the family, the risk takers, but perhaps this is a misinterpretation of their personalities because they are just characterized as more “open to experience” compared to their firstborn siblings, so they seem to be more rebellious. Although there two types of middle child the outgoing and the loner still the both share the common tendency to be good at compromising that made them almost compatible with

Salmon, these kind of relationship has a good vibe on its own. The eldest being always wanting to be in control and the last born who always seek for comfort and always wanted to be taken care of is actually a win-win kind of relationship. “The baby of the family tends to be the type who needs attention; the firstborn, who was alone for a while in the family, doesn’t need to seek attention, because he or she usually got it,” says Dr. Salmon from Schipani’s article ‘How does Birth Order affect Relationship’

Middle with Middle

It is very natural for a middle child to avoid confrontation and find their own opinion invaluable that on this kind of relationship, the most common dilemma they would face is the matter of communicating with each other. Their sensitive, compromising and accommodating nature could have given them and edge to their relationship but they need to develop each other’s self esteem to have good and quality communication and face the problem they refuse or deny to