Once you’re in a relationship, getting into the flow of things may cause you to overlook some of your own behaviors, including how you treat your partner.
If not realized or addressed, it’s possible some of your actions or words could alienate your partner or cause them to feel resentment toward you.
Spending all of your free time with your spouse, for example, could indicate you’re codependent and smothering them, and being on your phone constantly could mean you’re not giving your relationship the attention it needs to thrive.
“Awareness is the first step in making any sort of change,” relationship expert Susan Winter previously told Elite Daily. “Once we’re able to be honest with ourselves and admit our shortcomings, then we’re one step closer to our recovery of wholeness and emotional health.”
Here are some signs you may not be as good of a partner as you think you are, and how your actions could affect your relationship.
You can’t help but point out all the little things your partner says or does “wrong.”
In every relationship, each partner has at least one habit that ticks the other off. Although it’s normal to not see everything eye to eye, if you find yourself annoyed about everything your S.O. says or does — and feel the need to tell them so — it could mean you’re accidentally sabotaging your relationship.
“Needing to control our partner’s identity, actions, and thoughts is the opposite of love,” Winter told Elite Daily. “It’s about safety. It’s a one-sided obsession to guarantee conformity, which equals safety. It has nothing to do with love or intimacy.”
You like to have the last word during arguments.
If every time you and your partner get into an argument, you find yourself trying to “win” or have things your way, it could mean you’re viewing the relationship completely wrong.
According to Winter, a person who constantly has to have the last word views their relationship as a “conquest” or a test of desirability.
She also told Elite Daily that, if you act this way, “relationships are just one more way for you to feel your own sense of power.”
