5 Things Happy Couples Don’t Do

As a therapist, I work with a lot of unhappy couples.

And one of the most surprising things I’ve observed over the years is this: Creating a happy relationship is often about what you do less of, not more of.

Unhappy couples are usually stuck in a pattern of negative habits. From hypercriticism and sarcasm and to avoiding difficult conversations, the subtle habits we fall into as couples can slowly ruin a relationship despite our best intentions.

But remember this: If a habit that can be learned it can also be unleared.

What follows are five of the most common habits that lead to unhappy relationships. Learn from them and make your own relationship happier.

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1. Gossiping About Your Partner

If you asked 1,000 people whether or not they gossiped about their partner, only a handful would say yes. But that’s only because most people don’t realize that they’re doing it.

In reality, it’s surprisingly easy to end up gossiping about your partner:

• Chatting with your best friend about that insensitive comment your husband made at dinner last night.
• Complaining to your buddies about how your wife spends too much time with her mother.
• Venting to your coworkers about how lazy and unresponsive your boyfriend is.

Now, these might seem innocent enough on the surface, but the long-term effects are serious:

Gossiping about your relationship kills trust.

Think about it from your partner’s perspective:

• How would you feel knowing that every time you and your partner had a fight, he called his mother and told her all about it?
• How would you feel if each time your spouse was upset with you, she vented to three of her best friends — meaning they had a running history of your marital difficulties?

If your partner can’t trust that sensitive information will stay within the relationship they’ll eventually stop telling you.

And this is a quick path to losing intimacy in your relationship.

On the other hand, most genuinely happy couples have exceptionally good boundaries when it comes to talking about their relationship with others:

• As a rule, they just don’t talk about relationship issues outside of their relationship.
• If they do feel the need to, they check with their partner first and explain the rationale and the limits to those conversations.

Here’s the thing: happy couples tend to be happy precisely because both people are emotionally mature enough to be able to receive criticism from each other. And when this is the case, you don’t need to vent to friends, complain to your parents, or do any of the other forms of gossiping about your partner.

When you and your partner are a real team, you can work out almost anything together.

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2. Keeping Score in the Relationship

My therapy clients often tell me about how they did something that annoyed or upset their partner or spouse.

But almost in the same breath, they follow that up with a detailed report of how it shouldn’t be that big of a deal because there were three previous occasions in the last month when their partner did the same thing to them.

This kind of relationship score-keeping is unhelpful, for sure. But it suggests a deeper problem in the relationship: you don’t trust each other.

Couples resort to score-keeping because they feel like they need ammunition to defend themselves against future mistakes.

For example:

If you know your husband is going to blow up at you the next time you’re late getting ready to go out, and you don’t trust him to handle that in a mature way, you’re going to be ready with a handful of examples of when he was late, therefore making his accusations hypocritical.

But if you’ve gotten to this point — the point of needing to defend yourself by counterattacking — your relationship has much bigger problems than the two of you being late and frustrated.

Keeping score in a relationship means you’ve lost faith in your ability to handle mistakes together in a mature way.

If you routinely ask your spouse in a reasonable way to be more prompt getting ready, and they routinely ignore your request, it makes sense that you’re going to resort to more primitive persuasion attempts — like, say, blowing up!

If you routinely ask your spouse to be more helpful around the house and they routinely ignore your request, it makes sense that you’d resort to more primitive methods of persuasion — like passive-aggressively being late all the time.

Happy couples, on the other hand, don’t let things get this out of control in the first place. And their secret…

Happy couples are incredibly responsive to reasonable requests from their partners.

They know that, even if the request doesn’t seem all that important or crucial, it’s important to be responsive and follow through on it anyway because it builds trust in the relationship.

When you trust that your partner will respond to your needs and requests, you’re unlikely to resort to more primitive and toxic means of change — like tit-for-tat score-keeping.

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3. Leaving Your Sex Life to Chance

One of the most common misconceptions about sex has to do with the relationship between structure and spontaneity.

Most of us, it seems, want our sex life to be spontaneous. This makes sense: Many things, sex included, are often far more fun and enjoyable when there’s a strong element of spontaneity involved.

But here’s the strange paradox of spontaneous sex in a long-term relationship:

If you want your sex to be more spontaneous, make your sex life more structured.

Let me explain…

After the initial excitement of the honeymoon phases, sex doesn’t just happen as often as it used to. And for good reason — not only is there less novelty in the relationship, but real life easily gets in the way:

• After a long, stressful day at work, you’re just too tired.
• When your kids have been especially bratty all evening, you’re just not in the mood.
• If you’re worried about making rent this month, it’s hard to be excited enough to plan a fun sexual encounter.

The cure for life intruding on sex is to make your sex life more structured.

For example:

At first glance, planning to have sex every Thursday evening might seem a little cold and calculating — the very opposite of spontaneous! But think about it a little more…

When you know on Thursday morning that you’re going to have sex that night, you start thinking about it more throughout the day. Maybe you send your partner some flirty texts. Maybe you come up with a new idea for foreplay. All of which “primes the pump” and makes it more likely to actually happen later.

Having sex scheduled creates anticipation and desire, which are the key ingredients for exciting and spontaneous sex.

Sex is like art: If you wait around, simply hoping to feel inspired, you’re unlikely to produce anything great.

Similarly, passively hoping for a spontaneous sex life usually leads to a nonexistent one. But a structured sex life often leads to more frequent, fun, and spontaneous sex.

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4. Focusing Too Much on Your Kids

Kids are great. I’ve got three of them myself.

But here’s the trouble with kids: They’re little leeches—ready and waiting to suck up every last ounce of energy, time, and attention you’ve got. And if you’re not careful, they will!

A common theme among a lot of the unhappy couples I see in therapy is that they’re obsessed with their kids. Literally everything in their life revolves around their kids, with no time left for them. This is a major opportunity cost of obsessive parenting…

If you invest all your time and energy into your kids, you’re not going to have much left for yourselves and your relationship.

It’s a tragically common story:

• A couple decides to have kids and then dedicates themselves completely to those kids, pouring every last bit of time and energy into them. And they do it for years.
• But then, after years of not investing in their own relationship, they wake up one day and discover that they just don’t feel the same way about their spouse that they used to.

Well, no sh!t you don’t feel it anymore!

If you don’t invest in each other, you can’t expect to have a happy relationship.

Happy couples, on the other hand, understand that the Oxygen Mask Principle applies to more than just airplane rides: If you don’t take care of your relationship first, in the long run this will likely impact your kids even worse.

Think about it from your kid’s perspective:

Would you rather have parents with a happy, loving relationship who spent 5% less time with you than you’d like, or parents with a miserable relationship who constantly bend over backward to meet your every whim and desire?

Don’t let your kids be an excuse for not investing in your relationship:

• When you get home from work, send your kids to the backyard, lock the door, and enjoy an hour of peace and quiet with your spouse.
• Let your kids be bored for a Saturday afternoon and go for a walk and long lunch with your partner.
• And for God’s sake: Train your kids to sleep in their own beds!

Look, I know this isn’t necessarily easy. We love our kids and we want the best for them. And making time for ourselves isn’t always easy.

But if nothing else, it’s important to get your priorities straight about kids and your relationship.

I’ve seen plenty of happy families where the couple invests in themselves and lets the kids fend for themselves on a regular basis. But I can’t think of a single happy family where the parents ignore their own relationship in order to obsessively focus on their kids.

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5. Avoiding Difficult Conversations

When my daughters are old enough to be dating seriously, if they should happen to come to me for advice about dating, one of my most important ideas would be this: Choose someone who’s good at difficult conversations.

Plenty of people are good conversationalists. Which is obviously an attractive quality in a potential partner. Who doesn’t love stimulating thoughtful conversations, hilarious storytelling, or poignant reminiscences?

But here’s the thing:

In a long-term relationship, your happiness will have much more to do with how well you do difficult conversations, not easy ones.

Unfortunately, this is not something most people “test” for when they’re dating. They want someone who’s funny or interesting in conversations, but they don’t consider how they handle difficult or painful conversations:

• They may be charming while describing their backpacking trip to Peru last year, but how receptive are they when you point out an annoying habit?
• They might be hilarious talking about old stories from college, but how level-headed are they when you need to have a serious discussion about money and spending habits?
• They might be fascinating and thought-provoking when they describe their passion for social justice, but how compassionate are they when you describe something you’re really struggling with?

Turns out, most people aren’t actually very good at difficult conversations. As a result, they tend to avoid them. They develop all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle strategies for getting out of or dismissing difficult conversations.

This is a huge red flag!

On the other hand, a hallmark of happy couples is that they don’t run away from difficult conversations. No matter how good or bad they are at them, and no matter how uncomfortable, they’re mature enough to be willing to have them.

Happy couples are a team. And the most important form of teamwork in a relationship is the willingness to have difficult conversations.

So, if you’re thinking of getting into a long-term relationship, think carefully about your partner’s willingness to engage in difficult conversations. And don’t just guess — test it out!

Bring up a difficult topic and see how they respond.

If you’re already in a long-term relationship with someone who tends to avoid difficult conversations, start small. Practice bringing up mildly difficult topics and then encourage them afterward for being willing to do it. Then slowly build up from there.

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All You Need to Know

If you want to be happier in your relationships, learn to identify and eliminate these 5 bad habits:

Gossiping about your partner

Keeping score in the relationship

Leaving your sex life to chance

Focusing too much on your kids

Avoiding difficult conversations