Every relationship is different, but many relationships face similar problems. For example, these include cheating; feeling unsupported, blamed, controlled, misunderstood, not listened to; and issues with their sex lives. Some people even go as far as to call their spouses crazy. This isn’t uncommon. In fact, you’ve probably heard or felt something similar from your own life or other people’s lives. But I want to focus on why we develop laundry lists of complaints and why we seem to forget why we even got married in the first place?
Question 1: Why do we have so many complaints?
To find the answer, I started thinking about our egos. Not our egos as in our personalities necessarily, but our egos regarding self-esteem. Our ego isn’t bad by nature; it actually wants to help us. It works to make us look good and correct. Unfortunately, it often gets in the way instead. It wants to help you be ‘right’ in a given scenario, but your ego can also get deeply hurt if you’re not. This is just one example of how it can create separation between you and your partner. Especially because when we’re backed into corners and want to prove that we’re correct, we often look for faults within our partner’s reasoning. Instead of understanding that maybe our partners are right, we push that we’re right. And then we pluck a reason out of thin air that can be hurtful to our partner. Suddenly, our need to be right takes over everything. This kind of thing even often carries into therapy sessions with couples.
Think about it, one of the people you probably interact with most is your partner. And even then, the stakes are usually higher with them than with a friend. You need to be right in conversations that happen more and more regularly than with a friend. So as your need to be right increases and you fuel your side with hurtful comments, you can hurt your partner even more.
Then, BOOM, there’s that laundry list of complaints from either side. Maybe you’re convinced that your spouse is crazy, and they think you’re argumentative and insensitive. But it all stems from the initial desire to be correct.
Question 2: Why do we forget why we even got married?
So far, we’ve answered why we start building resentment and lists of complaints. We’ve just left off on needing to be correct to the point where it negatively impacts our relationships. Did you know that this is detrimental in the long term? Eventually, we forget all the good things that brought us together and all the good that still exists in our relationship. Our lists of complaints and feelings of resentment start becoming the only way we can describe our relationship.
No relationship is perfect, but when we allow the problems we may have to become the essence of our relationship, we taint the memory of something beautiful.
We forget why we even got married in the first place.
The Solution
So how do we fix any of this?
It will take work, but we can create a more fair and balanced space for ourselves and our partners. We can see our partners the way we used to, instead of with this new veil of resentment surrounding them.
The way to do this is by asking more compassionate questions and not taking things so personally. We need to shift our schools of thought from “I need to be right” to “I wonder why they think that” and even “maybe they’re right too.” Our differences can be beautiful if we reframe our mindsets. We can see our partners for who they are without the filter of our beliefs and assumptions.
It can take work and time, but it will be more than worth it.
If you’d like additional help, you can find us on our website at https://thattherapyspace.com/, by phone at (509) 800-7129, or by email at [email protected]. We are located in Liberty Lake, Washington, just minutes from Spokane, WA, and Coeur D’ Alene, ID.