It doesn’t make a difference whether you are perimenopausal, losing testosterone, or experiencing an entirely new chemistry as a result of aging or a chronic illness, we are still responsible for our actions. It might be much harder to maintain the quality of the personality you would like, but all that means is we have to quadruple our efforts.
Picking on your partner for tiny, infinitely small details is really just an addiction and an anxiety, a display of the type of picking anxieties you have going on in yourself, in your own life. Recognize the pattern. Recognize the pattern of calling somebody a name, like sloppy or lazy or rigid, or even cold. Taking away the name calling is a new way to communicate, and it must involve growth. Our relationship cannot stay in a quarreling state over utter nonsense and still maintain its sense of intimacy, romance, and compassion.
When you live with a person, there are ten million details, and nobody will ever be exactly like you. Some people really struggle to adjust to having another person in their space because they want everything the way they want it, and the other person is just messing things up. This viewpoint is a very compulsive pattern that has many sources, and it must be worked out through therapy, research, trauma recovery, healing, meditation, and awareness.
The impact it has on bystanders is unbelievable. Children experience it with parents like this, and so do partners in a relationship, and coworkers. And the individual who is dishing out the complaints is suffering in their own mind. When all things are great, there is beauty to notice, and silly details are easy to let go of instead of turning them into a problem.
We exaggerate these negative features, like somebody left a towel on the floor, or someone left the toilet seat up, or there is a lot of hair on the floor, or someone takes up too much space with their shoes, their clothing, and their handbags. There are a million things to quarrel over when it comes to coexisting with another person. Stop. This is not intimacy, and it isn’t a way to communicate.
If you truly believe the other person is not doing the best they can, and it bothers you, then just pack your bags and leave if you don’t want to work through it. But if you love that person, if you care for them, know that you are damaging the relationship by beating on them constantly. And if you’re the recipient of this, you have to learn how to communicate your boundaries. It’s okay for you to tell your partner to stop doing it, and if they fight you, you stay calm, you don’t fight them using their weapons, you stay calm, and you repeat the message over and over again with a soft tone, and you hope that somewhere in there, they will get it. They might not. You might have to absorb a lot of complaints.
When we marry, the commitment is in sickness and in health, and if you’re married to a person who badgers you constantly, you stay with it, you work on it, and you find more constructive ways to repair it. The most important thing is to be willing to take a quick look at yourself in the mirror and say, yes, it’s possible that I’m doing this thing. I don’t have to defend myself. I want to let go of this quality that doesn’t really serve me, and it certainly doesn’t serve the happiness of my partner. I’ll find another way to communicate.
In addition to that, we have to recognize when we feel heightened anxiety and manage it in that moment, and not take it out on the people around us. It doesn’t make a difference if we have to vacuum more often. It’s certain that the other person is doing things that are invisible to you, that are equal in their care and their concern.
I certainly know my words are more easily said than accomplished in task, but you must hear it first. It’s part of the learning. At first, whatever the lesson is might be difficult, because we don’t understand it and we certainly don’t know how to implement it in our lives. This goes back again to a repetitive concept, that it is practice that eventually gives us the growth we are looking for. But we first must be aware that we are doing something, that the other person is affected by it in a harmful way, and then we can’t let that be a blow to our self esteem.
We can’t be so selfish that we just think about how to protect ourselves rather than care for the partner we’re with, and as a result, we’re really caring for ourselves. There’s something hidden deep within the shadows of our mind that prevents us from seeing this and changing something we’re holding onto. It’s a dark chapter in our lives. We saw someone behave a similar way, or they behaved that way toward us, or maybe everyone around us was in conflict with each other. Maybe there was a mean parent, so everybody had to be the first to place blame for something. Or maybe we have certain obsessive compulsive patterns that are triggered when everything isn’t in its perfect place, and the other person is an agitator because the remote control isn’t being put down where you want it.
When you live in this realm, you are suffering, because you can only be by yourself. You’ll find it even hard to be with your own children and the closest people to you. Let go of half of the things you worry about first, that is the improvement. Maintain it as a part of your meditation and your commitment to character development. You care about these things deeply. Your partner does too.