Don’t pretend you have the perfect partner.
And whilst you’re at it, don’t pretend you are the perfect partner either.
You know you do things to annoy the absolute fury out of your partner. And whether your partner tells you it or not, there are things they wish you wouldn’t do.
You can feel their frustration. Unsaid. Said. We all do it.
It’s not a “you” thing. Or a “them” thing, as I’ve come to learn. It’s a human thing.
I do things to annoy my husband because I’m a human being. I do annoying things in and out of my control. Vice versa.
The problem most of us have, me included, is that we do things we would hate done to us. If we put ourselves in our partner’s shoes, we would be rightly angered. For some reason, we don’t seem to learn. And the vicious cycle continues.
Here’s everything we would hate our partner doing to us that we do to them.
1. Keep us waiting
No one likes waiting for someone. I hate it. It’s my biggest pet peeve.
To me, it shows no respect. It shows you don’t care about other people’s time. I can get really worked up about it, too. Pet peeves do that to you.
My husband keeps me waiting. This happens when you live with someone, go anywhere with them, travel with them.
You can’t be on time, one hundred per cent of the time. Even my irrational thoughts about my pet peeve know this.
Yet, I keep people waiting. I keep my husband waiting as I fuss around getting ready for a night out. Or when I promised to be somewhere and I don’t make it.
2. Saying we don’t care
Be honest now; put your hands up if you have used this throwaway phrase. Your partner just spilt tomato sauce over the seats of your brand new car and you say, “I don’t care.”
They keep you waiting, as per my last example, and you’re angry. But you still say you don’t care.
And you do care. Your partner just ruined your expensive new vehicle from silly carelessness. You’re furious.
When the shoe is on the other foot, when your partner does it to you, it’s insufferable.
You want to tell them you’re not a mind reader. Or that you know they care and you wish they could say it.
It goes along with phrases like:
- I’m fine
- I don’t want to talk about it
- It’s not you, it’s me.
We’re lying. We’re not saying what we really mean. And then we inexplicably pass on the same treatment to our partner.
3. Pretend to like a sex position
We don’t want to keep making the same “mistakes” in the bedroom. No one wants to be a sex let down.
But for some reason, we don’t seem to correct our partner when we don’t like a sex position. Even though we would like them to do it to us. We keep lying, pretending we’re ok with it.
If it’s not correcting the situation, we keep doing the position even though it brings no pleasure.
If we’re doing something wrong in the bedroom, we would our partner to say something. How awful we would feel knowing what we’re doing isn’t getting our partner off.
4. Pretend we’re fine with their socialisation choices
I hated my ex’s behaviour when he got together with his cricket mates. It was with these guys, not any others.
There was something about their group cohesion that didn’t gel well with me (why is for another day). I was vocal about my frustrations, but it didn’t stop his behaviour.
I guess you could say I wasn’t sympathetic when he objected to me hanging out with my work friends. He couldn’t stand our jocularity as a group.
Yet it didn’t stop me from hanging out with them.
This isn’t about choosing our friends based on who our partner likes, by the way. It’s more about our behaviour when we’re with our friends.
And all the ways we don’t do anything to make our partner feel more comfortable with having fun with “bad influences”, so to speak.
5. Unfair spending habits
Friends of mine recently experienced the need to upgrade their car. Their existing vehicle broke down, quite spectacularly. The husband was quite upset about the cost required to get a new car. To add insult, it was his mode of transport to get to work.
The husband said to me they would live on noodles to afford the new purchase.
He also had to sell some of his prized possession to afford the new car. Tough days but you do what you have to do, right?
Then the wife went out and bought a Chanel handbag. Yep. Almost eight thousand dollars.
It’s an example of conflicting and misaligning values. But had the situation been reversed, had the wife needed to sell her things to afford the car, she would have felt immense frustration at his spending habits.
This was tough to watch from afar, by the way. How could you do this to each other?
6. Controlling the remote
It’s such a small, trivial behaviour.
But when one person takes the remote, hogs it, and doesn’t let the other person decide what’s on the box, we get annoyed.
Yet, when we’re the first to get the remote, we make sure our partner doesn’t get a say.
It’s not about tit for tat. Some will want to blame that.
Even if you want to do that, the tit-for-tat game is the ultimate in doing something to each other we wouldn’t want someone to do to us.
This problem is also indicative of how we struggle with sharing equally in a relationship.
We want them to share with us, but for some reason, we can’t return the same sentiment. It’s the ultimate power struggle.
7. Saying it’s “my money”
When you’re married and you’ve pooled your life together, you want to look like a united front. Because behind closed doors, you’re united. You have shared finances, responsibilities and commitment.
But when you’re talking to other people about your life — say your house — you say it’s “my house”. Not our house. Or the family home. “My house”.
It is technically right to say it’s yours because it is. Yet, this is a “we” moment.
Now I know so many people hate the “we”. But when you’re standing next to your partner and project the idea everything you’ve built together is solely yours, you’re going to hurt your partner.
And you would hate it if your partner did this to you. Especially if you work your bottom off to be a united front and your partner pretends as if you’re not even part of it.
8. Cheating — plain and simple
Cheaters are the worst at this.
They would hate, loathe, and divorce a partner who cheated on them. They would probably act as if they have no idea how or why their other half cheated, even though they have the best insight of all.
Despite their insight and these feelings of the shoe being on the other foot, cheaters still cheat.
This is the ultimate act on this list that defies logic. It’s the worst thing you can do to someone that you wouldn’t want to have done to you.
We’re not bad people but we are hypocrites
By the way, this list could be longer. Huge. Out of control long. But I had to stop somewhere.
And I had to hold back my frustrations. With each thing I thought of, I felt worse about us.
It’s not that we’re bad people. It’s that we’re massive hypocrites.
What is the solution? Sure, we know what we’re doing. It’s good to know rather than live with our heads in the sand. But now you know how bad your hypocritical behaviours are, you can do something about it.
Essentially, you have two options in this scenario.
Option one; get used to the fact we’re not perfect and we will always do something to annoy each other. Even with the best of intentions, we won’t get it right.
Or option two; don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t do things that will annoy our partners when we know we would hate it done to us. Make a conscious effort to change our behaviour and focus on those things that make us the biggest hypocrites of all.
I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to do a little bit of both.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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