Are you damaging your relationship?

Are you unknowingly damaging your own relationship?

There are some obvious ways to bring your relationship to an abrupt and painful ending, such as betraying your partner but there are other, slower ways to kill a relationship and sabotage its potential. Not everyone is aware of the subtler ways people can undermine their relationship. If you become aware of them, admit to and fix these damaging patterns. You could save a relationship from unnecessary doom.

1. Withdraw love and communication during conflict

This is a typical response by many when fighting with a partner, but in reality what it teaches your loved one is that your love is conditional and depends entirely on whether your relationship is agreeable or not. Make it clear that your love doesn’t rely on getting along. Ensure your partner knows that even if you’re raging at one another, your love is constant. If you make sure you and your partner feel loved no matter what, even when in crisis and conflict, it’s easier to recover from the arguments and get back to feeling close.

2. Bottle your feelings in and then explode

Avoiding your feelings, or not acknowledging the smaller irritations and problems as they occur don’t make them go away. In fact they build into bigger problems, which then have a tendency to erupt in big, damaging explosions of anger, hurt, buried resentments and grudging feelings. This calm until chaos creates a relationship of uncertainty. The partner on the receiving end never really knows how you’re feeling and can be anxious that you might explode at any time. This is not a harmonious relationship and many can’t sustain the reactionary, unpredictable nature of it. Try to be more transparent with your feelings as they occur, or soon after, to avoid the big build up and gigantic, overwhelming release which is difficult to deal with for your partner.

3. Constant criticism

Nagging criticism chips away at a relationship. It makes a person feel belittled, small and bad. If you criticise every little thing, without tempering that criticism with praise, eventually your partner will shrivel as a person instead of grow, or they will become frustrated, angry, hurt and seek positive praise elsewhere. By being overly negative, too frequently, over too many things, you sabotage what you good you share together and what wonderful things they do offer you and the relationship.

4. Oversharing details of your relationship with friends and family

Your relationship needs to come first or you risk ruining it. Your lover and partner is your priority, not your friends, extended family, social media or gossiping co-workers. Don’t make your personal life fodder for their amusement, and don’t vent your issues to them, especially when your partner has asked you to respect their privacy and the privacy of your personal relationship. Agree on topics that are okay to discuss with others and stick to those.

5. Too many white lies

Many people think it’s okay to lie a little, and especially the “white lie” which are those small lies, lies of omission or lies to protect someone’s feelings. It’s occasionally okay, by most, to hedge your bets a little and say something nice rather than a blatant truth which may be hurtful (“yes, honey, that outfit looks really great on you”) but in truth, your partner wants your honesty and to trust your word more than anything. Without it, you don’t have a solid foundation together.