What are the ‘classic’ mistakes that people often make. Look at how you behave, react and communicate in your relationship and think about which message you’re sending to your partner – acceptance or rejection.
You Assign Blame and Keep Score
Good and bad things happen in relationships all the time – that’s the reality of it. If you start blaming your partner for the problems in the relationship or for your own problems there’s only one place that relationship is going – nowhere. Assigning blame to your partner is a neat way for you to sidestep responsibility for what you’ve got, but it isn’t going to help one bit.
You Get Stuck on the Differences Between You
We’re all different and most of us would recognise that that’s a good thing. In relationships it’s easy to get stuck on what’s different in our partner – whether it’s the way they do something, how they think about something or the way they feel about things. The fact is that partners don’t need to see eye to eye on everything, there will always be differences between you and there will always be things you argue about.
You Don’t Look at The Friendship
Good relationships have a great underlying friendship as part of their foundation. So many times people forget to look at their partner as a friend, and often show the negative, picky, selfish and judgemental sides to the one person who’s supposed to be getting the best from us.
You Let Your Baggage Take Over
Unfortunately there’s no instruction manual for relationships. The only place we learn how to have them is from our parents, watching those around us and our own past experience and baggage.
You Unwittingly Send Messages of Rejection
At the most basic level, the biggest fear that we all have is rejection and the biggest want we have is acceptance. The things you do and the way you behave in a relationship carries either a message of acceptance or rejection to your partner.