How We Notice Our Partner’s Faults but not Our Own

When we are in a relationship we can easily tell when our feelings get hurt. Since there is just another person it is quite obvious that we can pinpoint who did what to us and made us feel bad.

Then most of us try and get our partners to realize they hurt us and to stop doing the thing that caused the pain. This is very common with couples. But if you are the person who is often being told they are hurting their mate; you might begin to feel that you are not fully loved.

Criticism in relationships is incredibly common. Wonder why? All of us in a relationship like things the way we like them. Including how our partners act. We like them not to embarrass us and we like them to talk to us pleasantly. As humans we prefer things that please us. This is entirely normal.

But as someone who is sensitive to criticism, I know how terrible it feels when someone points out what you do not do well. It hurts some of us to our core. We can’t help it, that’s just the way some of us are wired.

All of us grow up with some ways of interacting with the world we live in. Most of us use our experiences to form patterns when we are little, and we use these patterns throughout our lives.

They often are just fine, unless we use them on our beloved and our mates don’t appreciate them. My pattern when I first met my partner in life was not helpful.

I was talking to a potential client for couples counseling when she asked me if I would be giving her a prescription to follow in order to get better.

I was stunned for a moment and I think in all my years of counseling I have never been asked this. But I do know there is absolutely no way to understand a couple without meeting them, and I don’t have any idea what would be helpful for them, because there is no one size fits all plan for couples.

All of us in a relationship have felt unsure about how stable our relationship really is at one time or another. This is very common with people who join each other with love and sometimes feel that love change in some ways that makes them feel uncomfortable.

Many of us who make it through these unstable parts can look back and be glad we did. But for others who wonder if they will ever get past the uneven stages here is some advice.

No one knows whether your relationship will last. But one thing that does help is if one of the partners says to the other when things get rough, “Don’t worry baby, we will work this out.”

Our childhood patterns are important to us when we are young. They keep us safe and help us survive. We often often bring those childhood patterns with us into adulthood, and because we can’t seem to change them, we sometimes let them stand between us and the love we experience in an adult relationship.

You may have experienced this in your own relationship. If you get your feelings hurt and your first response is for you to leave and just remove yourself from the pain, then you are reinforcing a childhood pattern that you have used in your past to defend against being hurt.

Many of us, when we find our special person, go all in. I know I have done this, maybe you have done this too. Going all in means that we love with our entire being. We have found the “right” one and we are blissfully happy.

This is how all relationships start. However, as anyone who has been with their mate for a while knows, that blissfully happy place doesn’t last. No, it doesn’t.

But if we are determined to build a life with the one we love, then we must learn new skills of how to love and be loved better. And these skills include understanding how we get hurt and how we heal.

Many of us get mad when our feelings get hurt. This is a very common human feature. A lot of us are wired to express our pain by getting upset, and that’s what we do.

But when we are in a relationship, the anger and the upset can be a problem for our mate. They might take it personally or they might try and fix us, but whatever they try to do to help us usually doesn’t work.

To love is to misunderstand. No matter how much we love our partners, we still won’t always understand them. In fact, most people in relationships spend lots of time trying to understand each other. And there are reasons for that.

When we couple, we are often completely taken with the person who is right for us. They give us a feeling of knowing each other in a way that is so inviting. It might even feel as if we have finally come home.

This is the most beautiful feeling ever. But after a while we start to see that our perfect mate does not understand us as much as we thought. Then the challenges begin. We might even get mad at our mate because they don’t get us the way we thought they did.

Communicating feelings in a relationship can be hard. Clients sometimes ask, “I tell him how I feel! Why doesn’t it work?” Let’s look at some differences in how we communicate and the best way we can reach each other.

Some of us are very good at speaking what is happening to us when our feelings get hurt. I know I grew up that way, always saying what I needed to say and hoping someone would listen and help.

This is probably a lifelong habit that many of us are very used to. But some of us in this world are not talkers. Maybe you are partnered with one. I am. He is great at a lot of things, but he doesn’t need to talk about what is happening to his insides. I do.

Tag Archives: fighting

How We Notice Our Partner’s Faults but not Our Own

Do You Tell Your Partner About Their Faults?

How Our Relationship Patterns Get in the Way

How To Fix Your Relationship

Unstable Relationship Moments: How to Return to Stability

When We Learn to Exit Instead of Connect

Painful Relationships Come from Loving Deeply

How to Manage Anger in a Relationship

How We Misunderstand Each Other in Relationships

Communicating Feelings in a Relationship So S/he Gets It!