I wished Edith Piaf was right and la vie était en rose, but sadly it is not. Piaf lied to us!
Life is a mess, so are relationships. We fight, screw up, hurt one another, we do all kinds of bad stuff, but you know what? These things are not what mess up our relationships, but the way we do them does!
The issue isn’t the fighting, dear friends, or what we fight about. These are small traps we can easily overstep and survive, but how we fight, that’s a live bullet. So will your relationship dodge it or get shot in the head?
Below are the 7 fighting behaviors that kill any relationship:
Mistake #1 When you give the Silent Treatment (aka The Silent Terminator!)
When we get hurt, scared or insecure in our relationships, some of us tend to press the ‘ignore’ button and give their partner the cold shoulder! It is their way to express the pain they are enduring.
Mistake #2 When you turn around and leave (aka The Coward Behaviour)
When people hit the wall of fighting, some of them tend to take a detour and walk away from the whole deal.
Mistake #3 When you breathe fire into the fight (aka The Bitter Behaviour)
When we’re hurt, we tend to fight dirty and since the other person is our partner, we know how to hit where it will hurt. We literally say things designed to inflict pain without visible bruising.
Mistake #4 When we reach out to other people for advice (aka The Gossipy Behaviour)
What is it with turning to everyone around us to find comfort, but not to the person who is causing our discomfort?
Mistake #5 When we pretend that nothing happened (aka The Time Bomb Behaviour)
You had a big fight, what now? Let’s sweep it under the rug, let’s pretend nothing has happened, or worse yet, when you don’t even let your partner know that they hurt you, when you swallow your pain fearing rocking the boat.
Mistake #6 When the fight has to have one winner (aka The No Win Behaviour)
When you pretend that someone is keeping score and someone has to be claimed the winner of the fight, so it’s ‘I am right, you’re wrong’ and that’s it.
Mistake #7 When you label your partners not their acts (aka The Labelling Behaviour)
When you don’t focus on the precise act, but start to generalize your partner’s behavior in it, when “You were selfish in this situation’ turns into ‘You are selfish’.
Want to kill your relationship? Use one of these bullets and it will do it for you. But if you want to have a bulletproof relationship, communicate with your partner, stay and fix what’s wrong. Never use your partner’s vulnerability against them, reach out for that friend who is fair, acknowledge your problems (everyone has them), compromise and find the middle ground. And last but not least, focus on the problem at hand and don’t make a general or broad statement about the whole relationship.
