Regardless of how a lot you’re keen on your companion, there are in all probability one or two—okay, perhaps 4 or 5—little issues they do this drive you up the wall. Maybe your endurance wears thinner with each loud, obnoxious slurp of their seltzer. Or perhaps you need to chuck their valuable cellphone throughout the room each night time after dinner, after they can’t appear to cease scrolling lengthy sufficient to concentrate to something you say.

If a sure behavior actually will get beneath your pores and skin, it’s best to carry it as much as your companion sooner quite than later—earlier than resentment builds up and also you instinctively snap at them, Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, a New York Metropolis–based mostly scientific psychologist who repeatedly works with {couples}, tells SELF. That mentioned, Dr. Romanoff provides, there’s one frequent mistake lots of people make when making an attempt to deal with or “repair” their important different’s irritating behaviors.

“Don’t criticize somebody with out an actionable request,” she says. For instance, she recommends avoiding critiques like, “You all the time neglect to inform me about your plans till the final second” or “It’s so annoying that you simply don’t clear up after your self and I’m caught washing your soiled dishes.” Complaints like this won’t solely make your companion really feel attacked (and subsequently defensive), however they’re additionally not very productive, because you’re not providing a constructive method for them to resolve the difficulty.

So, as an alternative of solely specializing in what they’re doing fallacious (and the way they’re pissing you off), “clarify the influence it has on you and make a request for what you’d like them to do as an alternative,” Dr. Romanoff suggests. With the eventualities above, for instance, she recommends extra constructive suggestions like, “It bothers me if you don’t inform me about your plans till the final minute. Sooner or later, may you give me a heads-up, in order that I don’t keep up all night time questioning the place you might be?” Or, “I’ve observed the dishes pile up within the sink. How about we clear them collectively proper after we eat, in order that they don’t linger and begin to odor?”

Shifting the dialog in direction of an answer is extra more likely to result in a significant dialogue, Dr. Romanoff says, and fewer more likely to end in an argument. “Your companion gained’t really feel such as you’re nagging, and so they’ll in all probability have a greater understanding of how they affect you and how one can perform higher collectively,” she provides.

You possibly can even use this technique for much less critical points, just like the seltzer slurping we talked about above, she says: You possibly can say one thing like, “I do not need to nitpick you, and I do know you’re not doing it on objective, however I really feel actually agitated after I hear that noise. Might you probably drink somewhat quieter?” That method, once more, you’re protecting the give attention to you and providing a fast repair, which ought to make your companion extra open to adjusting their habits—and stop you from dramatically pouring their pineapple Spindrift down the drain in a match of rage.

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