All relationships require balance. When balance doesn’t exist, particularly in unhealthy relationships, one partner typically takes on more of the work in an effort to maintain the relationship. Usually, one or both partners are keeping score. Rather than maintaining a healthy relationship, they’re maintaining a list of both efforts made and wrongs done. It may provide a balance, but I don’t think it’s the sort of accounting that makes our relationships stronger.
To be fair, this is often how some of us find the strength to leave toxic relationships. We’ve added up our efforts and their sins, and we’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing we can do is leave. Even in relationships that aren’t toxic but are wrong for us, paying attention to the balance in the relationship can help us determine its health.
But doing a health check of our relationships isn’t the same thing as keeping score.
When we keep score, we’re monitoring every mistake and holding on to it for later. We bring up past faults in arguments, listing all the ways our partner has done us wrong. Equally, we count up every extra effort we feel we’ve made to roll out at a later time as proof of our greater affection or effort. We’re making tallies — all with the intention of using it against the one we’re with at a time of our convenience.
I would even venture to say that most people keeping score aren’t doing it as intentionally as what I’ve spelled out. Many of us, raised in the art of score keeping, simply think that it’s normal and acceptable to track every wrong to add to our arsenal. For most of us, we didn’t grow up watching people fight fair and practice effective communication. Instead, we witnessed aggression and passive aggression, manipulation, and any number of unhealthy ways to communicate.
But keeping score in relationships, while normalized, is often one of the greatest barriers to true intimacy in relationships.
Keeping score sets partners against each other rather than encouraging collaborative problem-solving. We see our partners, as individuals, as the problem rather than seeing the problem as the issue that needs to be resolved. Addressing conflict this way creates trust issues as we get to see which small errors will be held against us rather than accepted and forgiven. Instead of being allowed human error, we’re reminded that any mistakes will be held on to, and we’ll be reminded of them at a future time.
Is it any wonder that intimacy doesn’t grow in this environment?
In my last relationship, the score-keeping wasn’t subtle. When the relationship took its toxic turn, I was reminded of the long list of ways I had failed to measure up to his exacting standards. Never mind that I wasn’t the Stepford wife type, he had decided what an ideal partner should look like, and I would get a specific detailing of how I was not, and never would be, perfect.
I never thought that I was perfect. If anything, I am perfectly frank about my flaws — which I know well and can list myself. I’m not proud of them. I’m doing my best. But I don’t pretend to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
But it wasn’t enough to remind me that I wasn’t perfect. He began to list all the ways I wasn’t even a good person. It was a surprisingly long list for so short a relationship. He would list all my faults and failings, and I would cry. Then he would act astonished that “telling the truth” would elicit that kind of response. It took me months to label this relationship as abusive. I’d called it toxic and unhealthy and a great many things. It took a little while longer to admit that the verbal abuse had been mounting along with the other, more pressing, problems.
But keeping score doesn’t need to be abusive to damage our relationships. Even the mildest form of score-keeping can break down our trust, communication, and intimacy. The reality is that we’re all human beings, and most of us are doing the best we can with what we know. Having been raised in diverse backgrounds with parents as flawed and human as ourselves, we don’t always have the healthiest ways of dealing with our feelings or our problems.
In the words of Alexander Pope, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” When we hold every error against our partners, we’re not allowing them the freedom to make mistakes, nor are we extending the forgiveness we would hope to receive if the tables were turned. Instead, we’re keeping a tally of every mistake for our later use.
The reality is that we often keep this list to balance the scales when it’s our turn to mess up. Then, to distract from our own blunder, we can roll out all the examples of how our partner is so much worse. We don’t have to deal with our own mistakes if we’re pointing the finger at theirs. When we keep scores, problems never get solved; they just get added to the tally.
At the same time, we often do this with our positive contributions to the relationship. Think about how entirely screwed up that is. If we’re tallying up our own acts of kindness, generosity, and effort to use it against our partner, how kind or generous are we really? There’s nothing quite like having someone do something for us now just to hold it over our heads later. This also creates a barrier to trust as we realize that even acts of kindness aren’t free in the relationship but rather something else to be used against us later.
These aren’t healthy checks and balances. They are the sign of work we need to do — both personally and within the relationship. While this behavior does damage, it isn’t always irreparable. Simply acknowledging our part in keeping score (note: not our partner’s), we can begin to learn better, more effective ways of communicating.
To dismantle score-keeping behavior, we need to learn new and healthier behaviors to practice within the relationship.
- We can make a habit of acknowledging our partner’s positive contributions in the relationship and practicing gratitude.
- We can direct address our own wrongdoing in the relationship without deflecting to our partner’s.
- We can address problems in the relationship with a solution-focused, collaborative approach rather than with assigning blame.
- We can take personal responsibility for our own tendency to keep score — and address it at a personal level rather than insisting our partners do all the work.
- We can seek outside help as a couple for dealing with unhealthy ways of communicating and dealing with conflict. When both parties practice score-keeping, it’s essential to work on this as individuals as well as a couple. The balance I mentioned can’t be achieved if only one person is putting in an effort toward creating a healthy relationship.
- We can practice forgiveness and remember that our partners are as imperfect as ourselves.
- We can address issues immediately rather than holding on to them for later. We can talk openly about how we’re feeling without trying to manipulate the situation or assign blame.
- We can practice being safe people for our partners — where they are allowed to make mistakes and make them right, where they can admit how they are feeling, and where they won’t be judged or criticized for simply being human.
- We can figure out our own deal breakers. If there are actions we simply can’t forgive, we need to end the relationship, not hold on forever to our accusations and anger within it.
- We can evaluate our own effort in the relationship and make any necessary changes. Do we show love and appreciation to our partners? Do we tell them they are loved and appreciated?
Unhealthy relationship behaviors are harmful for physical and emotional intimacy. They erode our relationships over time. Unfortunately, many of us accept this as normal — as if this is the only way to be in a relationship. But it’s not.
The balance we need in relationships won’t come from that careful tally — points assigned for good behavior, points deducted for poor choices.
Instead, it comes from both partners investing their time, effort, and energy into being healthy individuals as well as healthy partners. Healthy relationships happen when we take personal responsibility for our baggage and triggers — without assigning this to our partner to heal for us. Our relationships are only as healthy as we are, and when we get stronger as individuals, we end up tolerating so much less toxicity inside our relationships.
When we get healthy, we want our relationships healthy, too. We want the trust and intimacy, that safe space to be loved for who we are and to love someone back in just the same way. We’re no longer tallying every wrong and comparing it to our own efforts. We start being balanced partners who take on problems together, share feelings, and build stronger relationships based on connection, not on scorecards.
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Previously Published on Medium
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