Annoying Behaviors Could Be Ruining Your Marriage!
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Maintaining a happy, healthy, long-term relationship requires continuous work by both partners. Many marriages have been destroyed by BIG problems like sexual affairs, financial infidelity, verbal, or physical abuse or the like. BIG problems are the kind that can lead to divorce. However, smaller behaviors can become so annoying that they can lead to unhappiness in your marriage. It’s important to be able to identify them early and stop them in their tracks before they harm your relationship.
3 Annoying Behaviors That Can Ruin Your Marriage
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Poor Communication Skills.
If one or both members of a couple feel unheard, criticized, or shut out, it's very difficult to build a healthy connection and partnership. Unhealthy communication shows up in many ways within marriage including the following:
- Interrupting Your spouse while they are speaking. When you interrupt, you send a message to your spouse that you don’t want to hear what they have to say because what you have to say is more important.
- Taking offense to or becoming angry with your spouse when they express their feelings. When a person does not feel emotionally safe to express themselves to their spouse, they are likely to withdraw and shutdown.
- The inability to talk with your spouse about how you’re really feeling. Without being able to express feelings on a regular basis, small issues turn into suppressed, bottled-up emotions that boil over into explosive conflict when least expected.
Communication is a two-way street between partners. Engage in actively listening to each other, contribute to the conversation, and create an atmosphere where you can both feel safe to speak your mind in love.
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Addictive Activities Become Your Central Focus
Activities like scrolling social media, texting, work, shopping, and gaming can all become addictive. Whatever the source of addiction, it can drive a serious wedge between you and your partner. When someone is struggling with addiction, their priorities often shift away from their relationship and loved ones. The addiction becomes the central focus, leaving less time and emotional energy for the relationship.
Identifying an addiction is the first step toward healing for yourself and your relationship. If your spouse is engaged in addictive activities, you and your spouse need to have a conversation about it. Help your spouse understand how their addictive behavior negatively affects everyone in the family. Talk about and agree to ways to change this behavior. This might include limitations on the addictive activities and refocusing their attention on healthier activities that include the rest of the family.
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Excessive routines have diverted attention away from your marriage.
When you and your spouse neglect quality time together, don’t share interests, or simply fall into a rut, feelings of monotony and disinterest set in. External work, financial issues, or family routines can divert attention and emotional energy away from the marriage. Eventually this will create emotional distance that could open the door to unwanted attention from someone else.
To keep the spark alive in your marriage, counteract apathy with a bit of excitement. Surprise your partner occasionally with gestures, small gifts, or surprises. Have regular conversations and reinvent date night. Focus on the things you have in common. Identify common goals or projects that you can work on together.
There steps you can take to gently call your spouse’s attention to the issue and steer your marriage in a better direction.
- Timing and Tone is Everything. Try to empathize with them and choose a time when they are not tired or just unwinding from work to have a conversation.
- Lovingly approach the issue you want to talk about and ease into the need you feel is not being met. Be specific. “I love you and want to feel more connected to you, however I feel that …….is getting in the way of that.”
- Start with a Small Ask. Suggest one thing they could do each week that would address the issue. “Honey let’s try to have at least one hour of family time each night this week. “Giving your partner something small they can agree to makes it easier for them to start making a change in their behavior. Then you can follow up with more small, consistent request that build change over time.
Above all, remember that you and your spouse are on the same team so you can work together to resolve this. If you're struggling with relationship issues, consider using Marriage in a Box as a resource. This platform provides access to tools and techniques professionals use for relationship counseling. You can set goals, earn rewards, and find marriage coaching services on the site. Check out the available kits and sources of information online to improve your relationship.
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