After you've spent enough time on the job, you can typically assess situations and identify any missteps pretty early on. Marriage counselors and couples therapists are no different.
1. "I have provided couples counseling at different points in my career. One of the common mistakes I often see is a lack of communication and comfort with discussing difficult topics. When one partner is uncomfortable with discussing a topic, both partners are left feeling frustrated or dissatisfied."
2. "Not listening. Most people listen to respond and don't listen to hear. This is what I spend the most time teaching couples how to do!"
3. "One of the bigger factors in a successful marriage is couples responding to 'repair attempts' during arguments or conflict. Repair attempts are often little jokes or olive branches to help overcome issues and arguments. For example, my wife didn’t buy movie tickets in advance for date night, and they were sold out. It sucked! She laughed and sheepishly said, 'Well, at least we get to spend more time together staring longingly into each other's eyes!' That was her repair attempt. It works two ways though, I also have to respond positively to it."
4. "Keeping score. A partnership is a team, not a competition. Whether a person keeps a score of everything they have done or everything their partner has done, it is a death knell for the relationship. This is one of the most common causes of resentment in a relationship, and you see it often when people use absolute terms to describe themselves or their partners (i.e. 'I always...' or 'She never...')."
"Remembering that each person has their own needs, abilities, skills, and boundaries is essential to a healthy couple." —u/natgoeshome
5. "Expecting that because your significant other knows you better than others and is around you most, they are aware of all of your thoughts and feelings. Your partner is not psychic. No matter how often they are around you or how well they know you, they cannot pick up on every nuance to determine how you are feeling and how they should respond. That is called emotional babysitting, and it cascades into a host of problems and unnecessary hurt."
6. "Not expressing gratitude towards your partner on a regular basis. Experiences and expressions of gratitude can have a really positive effect on psychological well-being as well as relational strength."
7. "Never lash out at the other with past misbehaviors when trying to resolve a current issue. There is limitless crap we can pull out of our histories together to highlight past wrongs, but that just derails what could be a quick resolution."
8. "Therapist here, I have served couples. The number one problem I see is overactive threat responses that create anger and rigidity. People don’t stop to turn down their defense mode and lose sight of the love because all of their energy is going toward being right or controlling the outcome. Of course, that control comes from a place of fear, but fear and vulnerability feel too dangerous, so it typically gets expressed as anger, frustration, or rigidity. Surrender to not having control, accept what’s in front of you, and cultivate compassion."
"Please. Y’all rigid couples who just can’t prioritize empathizing with each other over your fear response are driving me nuts! :)" —u/WhyAreYouUpsideDown
9. "The main one would be expecting one person to be everything for them. You need friends, coworkers, a support system, and hobbies."
"Some others include keeping secrets or lies, and a failure to communicate effectively, though communication can be taught." —u/fairiefire
10. "When one half says, 'I am not happy about X,' do not respond with, 'Okay, but I am unhappy with Y.' Fix X. Get settled and then bring up Y if you still need to."
11. "Blaming their partner for all issues in the relationship and not taking ownership of their own role in dysfunction and/or issues. Every relationship is a partnership. Very rarely have I seen these types of issues in relationships be solely the fault of one person. Mistakes occur regardless of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc. These issues are usually dynamic and complicated in nature. They're generally the result of cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and/or interpersonal patterns of each partner interacting with each other."
"If you feel these issues are all your partner's fault, I would encourage maybe trying out individual counseling to talk about how you feel and learn more about how your cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and/or interpersonal patterns may influence your experience in your relationship." —u/maxpowerphd
12. "In 30-minute interviews, psychologist John Gottman was able to accurately predict which couples would divorce based on their interactions with each other, particularly when those interactions included the Four Horsemen: 1) Criticism, 2) Contempt, 3) Defensiveness, and 4) Stonewalling. My personal understanding of the issue is that problems arise from a lack of humility and the challenge of getting out of deeply engrained patterns or cycles of conflict. Overcoming this generally requires both partners to accept fault and extend grace."
"Research from the Gottman Institute has expanded on this to provide a pretty comprehensive list of factors that lead to couple conflict and divorce. Gottman also addresses solutions to these issues, which primarily exist within his form of couples therapy.
Take this all with a grain of salt. This is one perspective on relationships, but it tends to be a pretty robust and well-researched one (and it happens to be the one I'm the most familiar with)." —u/findingmytune327
13. "As soon as a couple stops being on the same team and fighting all the bullshit of life together, things fall apart. Get on the same team. Get behind each other's goals. If you're not on the same team, you're just going to wind up annoying the fuck out of each other. All that bullshit of life is going to be beating you down, and your life partner is just going to be part of it instead of your refuge."
14. "Sexual incompatibility. For instance, misunderstanding sex as a bonding activity, or when one believes sex is something one does to another as if it was just a utility."
15. "One of the most toxic things I have found in doing marriage counseling is when couples think of themselves as individuals who happen to be together rather than as a couple (not that I’m advocating enmeshment). That’s not really marriage. That’s having a roommate, or perhaps less than that even. Marriage is a union of two people. That’s what the unity candle and sand and knots are all about. There is a bringing together of two lives that are inseparable. If either member still conceptualizes themself as a solely autonomous individual whose actions and dispositions impact only themselves, things will go bad eventually. It results in a person caring more for themselves than their spouse. This is seen when couples spend money behind each other’s backs because 'it’s my money, why does it matter?' When couples keep secrets from each other, it inevitably results in pain."
"This is seen when couples don’t stop to consider their spouse’s thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, abilities, and strengths alongside their weaknesses.
The remedy to this is behaving as a unit in small ways and in large. If you’re getting something from the fridge, see if your spouse wants something. It even helps in arguments; no longer is it spouse against spouse, but it’s the married couple against the issue causing stress to the unit.
When one person considers a course of action, their thoughts ought to be about how it impacts the unit." —u/Negromancers
16. "People change. You will change. They will change. It is nigh impossible to have the same relationship two years in that you did at the start. Don't try to hold onto it. The only way my partner, who is an MFT, and I have stayed together for 10 years is because we were able to adapt to each other. That being said, don't try to force a relationship that's inherently dysfunctional. It's not a mark of failure for a relationship to end. Change seems scary, but the truth is you've already changed."
17. "Not giving intimacy in their relationship enough attention. This includes but is not limited to sex. Many relationships start with the 'hot and heavy' phase where intimacy can come naturally. As this phase diminishes, many couples do not spend the time and energy to consider how to maintain a healthy level of intimacy now that it doesn't just come naturally."
18. "In my line of work, I work with couples and their relationships a lot and do some forms of counseling. One of the common threads I see running in the midst of relationships/marriages that fall apart is a kind of selfishness: People that don't quite realize that marriage works best when you are both acting in the others' best interest and seeking their happiness more than your own. It crops up a lot, but not exclusively, in sex/intimacy: If your primary concern in sex is you, you are not going to build any kind of bond or intimate connection, nor is it going to be much fun for your partner. Marriage is a lot about sacrifice, and the couples I see thriving are the ones who are each willing to make sacrifices for the other and for their family."
"Couples who get married thinking that the coming decades of marriage are going to be exactly like the dating or the honeymoon phase have a real hard time dealing with major challenges or speed bumps they face in their life together. 'But I thought I was supposed to be happy.'" —u/Auto_Fac
19. "People don't learn to fight. You have to fight fair in a relationship. People go nuts when they get mad, and some couples never learn to fight in a way that honors the person they are fighting with. It is so important to learn to respect space, not assume motives, and take turns in explaining your views."
20. "Unspoken family rules that you bring into the relationship are HUGE. Obviously, you didn’t grow up together, and, depending on how you did grow up, you may have had completely different family of origin (FOO) experiences. It can be simple. For example, if your FOO separates laundry by color while your partner's FOO just throws everything in together, you'll have different family rules regarding laundry. It can also be complex. Maybe your FOO believes 'family problems stay in the family,' and your partner's FOO talks freely to people outside the family about problems. Everybody has these rules. Talking about them and uncovering them (without judgment) will go a long way in maintaining and deepening your connection. If you don’t talk about them, it is easy to get into negative interactional patterns that are just rehearsals of how your FOO did things rather than creating healthy, mutually safe patterns."
"I also recommend that everyone in a relationship take an attachment style quiz and compare their attachment style (secure, anxious, or avoidant), because that reveals a lot of unspoken rules as well." —u/Stellaheystella