First, you and your partner are so smitten that you doubt the honeymoon period will ever end, and before you know it, you find yourselves sitting in front of a couples’ therapist. Where did it go wrong? The longer you stay with someone, the more assumptions you make: “Well, I’m sure they know how much I love them by now” and “They should know how I feel or what I think at this point.” Though that’s true to some degree, he or she is not psychic (unless they are) and communication is still very much vital to a relationship at any stage. When we stop sharing our concerns, needs, and feelings with our partners, that’s when things start to fall off.
“I think the main one is that we forget that we’re teammates,” said relationship coach Tara Caffelle when asked what the most common mistake she sees couples make. “I’ll talk to one member of a couple, and we’ll come up with some brilliant discovery, and then they’ll say, ‘Do you think I should tell my partner about this?’ and that’s when I wanna smack them on the head and go, ‘Well, of course you do!’ Like why wouldn’t you tell your partner this? This is a piece of you.”
You have to remember those early days when you used to tell each other everything. Once distance starts to form between you two, it’s easy for it to go unnoticed until it really becomes an issue, and it’s also difficult to close once you reach a certain point.
“I think somehow it becomes that we’re adversaries in our minds, and we stop thinking about sharing the vulnerable pieces of ourselves or being a team and calling your person,” Tara said.
