Are you irked by your partner’s annoying habit or trait? Learn this one trick that can help you, deal with it in a healthier way.
If you think about it, people are always ending relationships because something about their partner is making them unhappy. A person might break up with their partner, for example, because they’re tired of dealing with:
- Something about the way they look
- Habitual behaviors that are annoying
- The kind of people they spend time with
- Aspects of how they behave
If somebody can no longer deal with issues like these with their significant other, they’re likely to end the relationship.
But hold on a minute…
You are never going to find a perfect partner that doesn’t have any habits, friends or other characteristics that don’t annoy you. No one is that perfect.
So, the success of any relationship depends on how well you handle the things about your partner that you don’t like very much. This is what I want to show you how to do by learning a simple trick to communicating better with your partner.
How Should We Deal With These Differences?
Hollywood rom-com lure us into the unrealistic expectation that all we have to do is find the perfect partner and live happily ever after with them in perfect compatibility.
This expectation can lead us to believe that we never have to communicate to our partner that something about them doesn’t make us happy. Surely our perfect mate would just know this instinctively without being told!
And that’s a pretty unhealthy way to see your relationship.
In the real world, you really have to air your grievances when something about your partner bothers you. And remember that it works both ways. When your partner is unhappy with something about you, you’re better off if they tell you about it openly.
Related: Research Proves The Most Successful Relationships Come Down to 3 Basic Traits
Here’s How It Works
Being assertive can help keep your relationship together. Relationships often fail precisely because at least one of the partners is afraid to articulate their own wishes and needs clearly and assertively.
This ends up causing a LOT of frustration, which is just one of the many silent killers in relationships.
When something continues to bother you for a long time and you do nothing to address it, your frustration is going to build. After a certain point, you feel like it would be easier to just get out than to go back and deal with the issues that lead to your current levels of frustration.
That’s why so many breakups seemingly come out of nowhere when in actuality the problem has been building behind the scenes for a long time without being addressed. You need to avoid contempt, resentment, and frustration building up like this.
Asserting Yourself Can Prevent Frustration
If the frustrated partner in this relationship had been more assertive and open about their grievances, this out-of-the-blue breakup probably needn’t have happened at all.
Airing grievances is a kind of safety valve that allows you to release pent-up frustrations about your partner before they build and cause problems. Talking about differences in a healthy way can help you to resolve them.
As an example, a young man once told me about an issue he and his girlfriend were having. She had a little bit of hair on her top lip that bothered him when they were making out. Out of a fear of hurting her feelings, he never mentioned it to her… by the time I talked to him he’d decided that his only option was to end the relationship in spite of how much he liked her.
This story illustrates how a failure to assert yourself leads to feelings of frustration and even to a breakup. When something about your partner is annoying you, it’s essential that you bring it out into the open and deal with it. If you don’t, you could be looking at a breakup down the road.
Related: The Most Annoying Thing About You (According To Your Zodiac Sign)
My advice to the man
I told him that his only option was to tell his girlfriend how he felt.
The following week he contacted me again to thank me for the advice. Much to his surprise, she was much less hurt and upset about what he said than he expected her to be. He found out that airing his problem was MUCH less painful than the frustration he had allowed to build by just putting up with the situation in silence.
No doubt his girlfriend didn’t enjoy hearing that her boyfriend didn’t like her little bit of facial hair. But telling her about the issue was a lot less cruel and painful than simply dumping her out of the blue and never telling her why it happened.
The way this situation played out was a win-win. Had the young man continued keeping his grievance to himself instead of asserting himself, all would have been lost.
This is what you must do
If you’re in a relationship, make sure that your partner understands how important honesty is to you.
You and your partner should agree right from the start that you will let each other know whenever something is annoying you – that all grievances should be aired between you.
Right from the start, you have to value and practice assertiveness with your partner so that little problem doesn’t grow into major frustrations that can jeopardize the future of your relationship.
Asserting yourself doesn’t mean that you have to nitpick about every tiny annoyance in your relationship. Assertiveness becomes important for problems and annoyances that you can’t just let go without feeling frustrated.
Openness Fosters Real Intimacy
If you aren’t assertive, bad feelings like frustration will build up inside of you as you continually feel like your rights are being violated.
Over time, this buildup of negative feelings can lead you to lash out at your partner without warning.
These outbursts are signs of an unhealthy relationship.
Related: Never Settle For A Man With These 15 Habits
If this is happening on a regular basis, the intimacy at the core of your relationship is bound to suffer at some point. And consequently, problems start to appear in the relationship. For this reason, it’s a good idea to be assertive right from the start and deal with problems in an open and communicative way.
Creating a “culture” of assertiveness in your relationship builds understanding, connection, and communication between the two of you, leading to more intimacy.
Leave a Reply