4 Subtle Signs You May Be Sabotaging Your Relationship Without Realizing It

None of us like to think that we might very well be the ones destroying that which is good in our life.

However, many of us do exactly that with our relationships without ever really fully understanding why or even that we’re doing it in the first place.

There are a lot of reasons why you could be sabotaging your relationships. Most of those reasons come down to fear. A fear born from the past, from a rough childhood that taught you the wrong way to treat your partner, or a fear of the responsibility that will be placed on you if the relationship succeeds.

I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts.

– Michael Buble

Wherever it comes from, the signs that you may be sabotaging your relationships are the same. Here are four such signs to look out for to help you start on the path toward developing healthier relationship habits.

1. You regularly cancel plans

Do you grow extremely flaky at about the same point every time in your relationships?

Sabotage tends to kick in when we start to feel a particular kind of emotional closeness to our partner. However, there’s not usually any outward sign of this change in emotion– at least not one that’s easy to pick up on– but you can spot changes to your behavior that might be related to it.

Can your partner count on you to show up or are you shaky at best? If you’re shaky, you might be sabotaging your own relationship.

2. You start to make excuses about why you can’t be intimate

A lack of intimacy in a relationship is always a red flag, but when it’s you who are making the excuses as to why that can’t happen, you’re most likely sabotaging your own relationship.

For any relationship to survive, a certain amount of physical intimacy is required. It’s part of how we communicate love, so that nonverbal communication is critical to maintaining our emotional connection to one another.

3. Your arguments are more about being right than disagreeing

Fighting is a normal part of any healthy relationship. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.

However, those fights should remain respectful and with a strong sense of caring for your partner (and they for you) in the background. In other words, you're never truly being disrespectful or mean to each other intentionally.

But if your arguments are more of an attack on your partner? If you find yourself blatantly disregarding how your partner feels when in an argument and even causing them pain for the sake of making yourself feel better, that’s a sign that you’re sabotaging your relationship.

4. You start comparing at exactly the same point

One of the more obvious patterns you might be able to notice is how at exactly the same point in every relationship you start comparing your partner to your ex or some perfect imaginary man or woman whom you believe is out there.

Sure, you shouldn’t settle, but that’s not necessarily what’s going on. You should be careful that you’re not in fact just sabotaging because you grow discontent at the same moment in every intimate relationship.

Sabotage more often than not rears its head in the same recurring fashion, so if you pay attention to the patterns that keep arising in your relationships, however strange, they’ll typically point you in the right direction.

RELATED READING

• Your Soulmate Will Destroy ‘You’ – Here’s Why
• If Your Partner Can’t Say These 7 Things, They Are Probably Not Your Soulmate