Keep score (How to ruin a perfectly good relationship)

Use your mind like a psychological bookkeeper and remember "the score" at all times. Remind yourself of the ways you give to the relationship and your partner doesn't.

Tell yourself things like:
A good marriage should be 50-50 (an untrue and dangerous myth, by the way. It is only distressed couples that focus on the 50-50 score keeping)

I'm always the one who takes out the trash.

Why am I always the one getting up with the baby in the middle of the night?

I'm always the one who says sorry and initiates affection. S/he never says sorry. It is so unfair.

Keep at it and your feelings about the relationship will quickly fester into a stew of resentment, ensuring that you stop being loving and start creating distance in the relationship.

Keeping score is a "me-centered" way of operating, by which you're elevating your role in the relationship to a place of superiority. And if you're "up," then your partner has only one place to land: down. Down in the swampy, stagnant pond of "not enough": he doesn't love me enough, she doesn't care enough, I don't love him enough, etc.

Get the picture?

This type of thinking is a highly effective way of ruining a perfectly good relationship.

To turn a distressed relationship around, on the other hand, try this instead:

Give for the joy of giving.

Give because it makes your life and your relationship run more smoothly.

Give because you see that a task needs to get done and you know you're capable of doing it.

Give because you know that when the relationship wins, you win.

Be on the lookout and remind yourself for how your spouse contributes to the marriage partnership in other ways.

Blogger Sheryl Paul puts it rather beautifully:

"Not only does this counteract the habit of keeping score, but it's also a way to cultivate appreciation. And appreciation, as most people know, is like a magic elixir that bolsters our feelings of love and attraction.

It may be helpful to think of your relationship like a pool. When you tend to the third body of the relationship — not just me or you but the third body of us — through acts of giving, you fill the pool with clear, warm water.

When the pool is full, it feels good for both of you. And the more you give naturally and without conditions or expectations, the more you will inspire your partner to give as well. And then the pool stays full most of the time, and it's a place where you both like to swim".

Isn't that a lovely image?

Happy swimming in the pool of love <3