Today, I bring my husband Chris to get his perspective on the challenges we were facing, especially at the beginning of our relationship. As time progressed, I realized that often these were “my” challenges, rather than “ours”. I kept making mistakes that could really affect or even ruin a relationship, until I finally learnt better. You don’t have to repeat these mistakes and this is what we chat about in this episode on some concrete real-life examples.
We start off with mistake #1 which is that often we have the tendency to take things personally. Chris and I unpack our biggest conflict from our beginnings which was about TV and how his watching TV had nothing to do with me as I interpreted it.
I dive into mistake #2, expecting that our partner should fulfil multiple roles being a husband, lover, best friend, book reading buddy, loving father, hiking partner and so on. Chris describes how important it is to have different people fulfilling different roles and we illustrate this with the examples of love for reading and soccer.
Mistake #3 is all about us having luggage from our past experiences. I describe how distrustful I got when Chris suddenly put a lock on his phone and wondered what he was hiding from me. Chris offers his perspective on why did it and how it had nothing to do with him doing something “shady” in our relationship and I add how my past experience made me think about this in a certain way.
These three mistakes are not applicable only to our romantic relationships, but generally to everything in our lives. If you want to be happier and start learning how not to take everything personally, expecting things from certain people that are beyond the relationships or how not to let your past affect your present, pop in those headphones and choose to Screw Being Unhappy, even if it is one tiny step a day!
