By taking our relationship advice from movies, novels and our parents, we’ve set ourselves up for a lot of discomfort and heartbreak. The cycle of trial and error continues through the years and since confused people are giving advice to other confused people via nanny columns and magazine articles, the cycle continues. What is worse is that due to this constant stream of misinformation, we have ingrained habits into ourselves that are incredibly toxic for relationships. We know that doing these things causes us discomfort and anguish, and we keep doing them anyway because they seem to be the norm.
Due to advice you have gained from self-help books or other sources, let’s look at a few things that you might be doing that are not only not beneficial for your relationship, but in fact might be ruining it completely.
1. Keeping score.
You’ve heard about the relationship scorecard in one way or another and without a doubt, have kept one of your own at some point.
This is what happens – one of the people in the relationships does something wrong. Maybe they say something out of line, act in a hurtful manner or do something which the other person doesn’t approve of. But instead of addressing the issue or letting it go, you make it a card that goes into your log with the sole intention of pulling out or using this card at some point in the future.
So, she showed up late to your friend’s birthday party? Why not bring up this incident three years later when she asks you to attend a dinner that you don’t want to?
The above situation, or some variation of it probably sounds familiar to you. The relationship turns into a balancing sheets of rights and wrongs where each person is trying to make lesser mistakes than the other so they can hold the moral high ground. If you’re spending all your time trying to be less guilty than your partner, you are already down a completely wrong road.
How to fix this – Unless some situation is actually related to something that happened in the past, stop bringing it up. If you have a burning problem that you need to talk about, don’t wait until you end up in one of these situations where you can guilt the other person into talking about it. If it really hurt you that much three years ago, you should have talked about it three years ago. Let it go.
Unless one of you is Charles Xavier, you are probably going to have some situations where your partner cannot magically predict what it is you want. You let the fact that your partner doesn’t have telepathic powers bother you, and then you act weird and drop small insults or jabs during your time together hoping that they will eventually stumble upon your point.
This is indicative of a deeper problem in your relationship. If you are uncomfortable expressing your desires openly and clearly to your partner, maybe you need to address why this is so.
How to fix this – It’s been mentioned before, but it needs to be said again. Your partner doesn’t have magical powers. If you are going through life with notions that being in love people spontaneously telepathic, you are going to create a problems for yourself and your partners. Just tell them what you want. They may not agree, but you can forgo the needless song and dance.
3. Issuing ultimatums.
While the jury is still out about why we have certain behavior patterns, there is one thing they agree on – bringing a ton of neuroses into a relationship is a recipe for disaster. You might have experienced a situation like the following yourself.
One person in the relationship feels slighted in some way, and chooses to put the entire relationship on the line as a way to get the problem solved. For example, instead of telling the other person “I think you’re too judgmental at times,” they say “I can’t be in a relationship with someone who is judgmental all the time.”
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