“Picking Your Battles” Isn’t the Best Thing for Your Relationship

Here is the thing about being romantically involved with another person: inevitably, they are going to do something that really irritates you. They are going to continue to irritate you repeatedly over the course of your relationship until acted upon by an outside force (which is really just you telling them that what they’re doing is bothering you). This is a fundamental truth of being in a romantic relationship. 

Relationship irritations are those little things your partner does that get on your nerves. For me, it’s when my husband leaves every single kitchen cabinet open after rummaging through them. Inevitably, the next time I walk into the kitchen, I feel obligated to close them all. For others, it may be their partner leaving their shoes in the middle of the floor when they get home and not moving them out of the way (in my house, my husband and I are both guilty of this, so it is probably only an issue for our cats to traverse).

Address it or ignore it?

When a relationship irritation presents itself, we have two primary options: we can address the issue, or we can try to ignore it. Research has found that 40% of irritations faced by people in a romantic relationship go unaddressed. Common wisdom recommends you should “pick your battles” with your partner, and learn to let the little things go. But is that really the case? To better understand where this wisdom falls short, I am going to introduce you to two couples who are experiencing relationship irritations.

Our first couple, Jodi and Tony, are married and have lived together for 6 years. They recently bought a new coffee maker that can make both single-serve coffee and a pot of coffee, which is very convenient! Every morning this week, Jodi has woken up first, and has gone to make coffee where she takes the old coffee pod out of the single-serve experience, and leaves it next to the coffee maker instead of throwing it out. Now, when Tony goes to take out Jodi’s pod from earlier today, he is forced to throw out both her most recent pod and the pod she left next to the coffee maker, and to clean up the remnants left underneath that pod on the counter. Naturally, this is frustrating for Tony, but it's a stupid little thing that he can just deal with—it takes about a minute to handle and he just does it without thinking too much about it...

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