It's the time of year when experts on relationships give advice. Not experts on their own, but rather experts on yours.

All that's needed is a weak observational study based on surveys and it practically writes itself.

Writing in Journal of Marriage and Family, Matt Johnson, an assistant professor in Family Ecology at the University of Alberta, co-authored a paper to help anyone who's had rocky relations with their parents while growing up, which is to say almost everyone on planet earth: their advice is not to let it spill over into your current romantic partnership, which you don't really need to read in an article on Valentine's Day.

The relationship between parents and teens, however stormy or peaceful, may influence whether children are successful in romance, even up to 15 years later, according to a new paper written based on correlations found in surveys of 2,970 people who were interviewed at three stages of life, from adolescence to young adulthood, spanning ages 12 to 32.

They say their findings uncovered a "small but important link between parent-adolescent relationship quality and intimate relationships 15 years later," Johnson said. "The effects can be long-lasting."

Yet another thing to blame your mother about.

They unsurprisingly found that good parent-teen relationships resulted in slightly higher quality of romantic relationships for those grown children years later.

Frank Ocean didn't need to spend time looking at surveys to state the obvious. Since Frank Ocean does not have an official Twitter account, we don't even know if it took Frank Ocean to state the obvious, it could have been a 12-year-old girl.

"People tend to compartmentalize their relationships; they tend not to see the connection between one kind, such as family relations, and another, like couple unions. But understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognizing any tendency to replicate behavior — positive or negative — in an intimate relationship."

That doesn't mean parents should be blamed for what might be wrong in a grown child's relationship, Johnson added, which would seem to defeat the whole purpose of reading the paper then. Tell me about your childhood is psychology from the 19th century.

"It is important to recognize everyone has a role to play in creating a healthy relationship, and each person needs to take responsibility for their contribution to that dynamic."

Citation: Johnson, M. D.,&Galambos, N. L. (2014), 'Paths to Intimate Relationship Quality from Parent-Adolescent Relations and Mental Health', Journal of Marriage and Family, 76, 145-160.