How to Avoid 5 Common Relationship Errors
Guest post by Dr. Yael Schonbrun on the science of avoiding relationship blind spots
This week, I’m thrilled to feature a guest post by Dr. Yael Schonbrun, clinical psychologist and the creator of Relational Riffs, a weekly Substack newsletter where she explores the science and practice of thriving in relationships.
In this post, Yael dives into common relationship mistakes many of us make and shares actionable strategies to avoid them. Relationships are at the heart of our lives, and yet, they often feel like the most complex puzzles we face. We think we understand those closest to us, only to discover how often our assumptions miss the mark. Yael is reminding us that discomfort isn’t always a sign of doom, that differences can be enriching, and that trying to understand matters more than getting it right. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post and hope you will too.
Yael is a clinical psychologist, an assistant professor at Brown University, and the author of Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like too Much). Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other notable publications.
When it comes to relationships, we all need information and advice we can trust. I highly recommend subscribing to Yael’s newsletter to gain valuable tools for building healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
Enjoy Yael’s post below!
Most people feel confident that they “understand” people they are close to and “know” exactly what the other person means when they express themselves and why they behave the way they do. And I’ve seen countless people discover just how off-based they are through a course of relationship therapy.
But people who land on a therapist’s couch aren’t unique—we all make mistakes in our closest relationships. It’s human.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his close collaborator Amos Tversky famously distinguished between two kinds of thinking: rapid and intuitive thinking versus slow and deliberate thinking. Their work upended the assumption economists had about humans as rational actors. These discoveries helped illuminate why we make irrational judgments, decisions, and assumptions. For instance, people value losses more highly than gains, perceive vacuous messages as persuasive when they are delivered confidently, and exaggerate the likelihood of unlikely events.1 We think we’re thinking rationally, but we make all sorts of biased judgments and decisions.
It isn’t just in assessing the world outside of our private homes. In our closest relationships, social scientists are discovering that we predictably make mistakes—quite often!2
As Kahneman and his colleagues showed us, we can’t undo our tendency for automatic, intuitive thinking. But there is something we can do. Kahneman counsels, “The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”
Relationship science offers us a valuable assist here, pointing out the common errors we make and allowing us to be more deliberate about avoiding those errors.
In this post, we’ll dig into a few common errors and learn some strategies to avoid making those errors.
Mistake #1: We assume relationship discomfort is a “bad” sign.
While being forced to watch two full minutes of Hulu advertisements, it occurred to me that every single marketing ploy was about reducing discomfort. There’s the discomfort of needing to go to the store (meal kits will save you!); the discomfort of sharing a bathroom (home rentals for the win!); the discomfort of not knowing what gift to buy (go to this or that site and you’ll find the perfect item!). So much of our modern consumer culture is built on reducing discomfort, a clear play into our human drive to reduce the experience of tension, uncertainty, or physical discomfort.
The same drive to eliminate discomfort exists in relationships.
Though our aversion to discomfort makes sense from an evolutionary perspective—throughout early human history, taking action to escape discomfort offered survival advantages—in our modern world, discomforts are rarely indicative of lack of safety. The same goes for our relationships. Many relationship discomforts are less an indication of true threat and more an indication of growth or change (or a need to grow and change).
Growth and change, of course, are very good for relationships. And when we respond to discomfort with the reflex of eradicating it, we often skip out on opportunities to grow and change as individuals or to have our relationship itself grow and change.
Rather than assume discomfort is a sign of something wrong, consider the possibilities that discomfort offers for growth and learning about ourselves, our relationship partners, and our relationships, themselves.
Fix #1: Reframe relationship discomfort as essential to healthy relationships.
Mistake #2: Thinking differences are a sign of a bad relationship.
Consider these common differences:
An optimist and a skeptic
Republican and Democrat
Direct communicator and indirect communicator
Introverts and extravert
Spender and saver
Planner and spontaneous
High libido and low libido
These differences (and so many more) create discomfort because they introduce friction in decision-making and make it feel as if you aren’t living in the same world of values and aspirations. Thus, differences = bad.
But what often emerges in the couples’ therapy room is a surprising finding that uncommon ground offers a host of benefits. We tend to overlook those benefits because the discomfort of differences automatically causes us to interpret them as “bad.” So, rather than fearing uncommon ground, we can embrace its power.
Consider the Taoist symbol of yin-yang, which reflects how a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly when those parts sit in opposition to one another. Effort without rest, quiet without noise, spending without saving, and thinking without doing are unhealthy and unharmonious. The combination of opposites is what yields a synergistic harmony.
Seeing differences in this way helps us transform our experience of discomfort into an opportunity to expand our perspective, prevents extremism, and enriches our lives by motivating us to do things we’d otherwise avoid. For instance, if one parent is a disciplinarian and the other leads with love, consider how beneficial it is for each person to see the benefits of the opposite way of doing things and for the child to live in a home where both love and limits are readily available.
Fix #2: Reframe uncommon ground as holding uncommon possibilities.
Mistake #3: We think being accurate about people we love matters the most for our connection.
One of my favorite pieces of relational science is a study that investigated whether empathic accuracy or empathic effort mattered more for relationship satisfaction. This study brought heterosexual couples into a laboratory to be videotaped having conversations about upsetting events. Each partner rated the emotions they felt during the conversation, the emotions they believed their partner was having during the conversation, and how hard they thought their partner was working to be empathic to them during the conversation. For both husbands and wives, empathic effort mattered more than accuracy in predicting relationship happiness. As lead researcher, Shiri Cohen, told me during an interview,
Partners don’t have to be communication superstars or even skilled at reading emotions. What matters more in the process of connection is sensing that your partner is actually trying—that they genuinely care about your feelings and want to understand, even if they don’t.
So rather than aiming to get your partner right, aim to care to try to know them a little better over time. After all, they are constantly evolving, as are you, so you’ll never fully crack the code of someone you love. Instead, make your love be evident in the trying.
Fix #3: Embrace the relational benefits of being humble about what we know and curious about what more we can learn.
Mistake #4: We think we’ll have more control if we get more controlling. But in fact, we gain influence by giving up control.
In a fascinating book called Never Split the Difference, FBI negotiator Chris Voss explains one of the central truths of negotiation–that negotiators can’t threaten “and expect that to work. The reason for that is something called ‘the paradox of power’—namely, the harder we push the more likely we are to be met with resistance.”
Psychologists studying this phenomenon explain that when people feel like their agency is being undermined, a drive to restore their agency kicks in (research on this concept is reviewed in an academic article that is hilariously titled, “A 50-year review of psychological reactance theory: Do not read this article”).
We often think about how our toddlers or teenagers resist our efforts to control them,3 but partners, friends, and colleagues also don’t want to be controlled. When we find ourselves disliking our partner’s behavior, attitude, words, values, or moral stances and respond to them in ways they experience as controlling, it’s a high likelihood that rather than gaining control over anything, we’ll lose all influence.
The paradoxical solution to a situation where you don’t favor what your partner says, does, or feels, is to recognize their agency in and right to continuing to say, do, and feel the exact same way. When we do that, we paradoxically open the door to having more influence.
We only need to consider why this works if we put ourselves in the shoes of the person who is being controlled. When we are doing something we think is right on and someone says, “Hey, you better stop that because you are doing an awful thing,” we feel defensive. And defensiveness causes us to dig out heels in and, well, defend ourselves. Alternatively, your response might be different when someone tells you, “Hey, you have every right to do that thing you’re doing and I can see why you think it’s reasonable. But would you be open to hearing something about how that behavior is impacting the family?” Your receptivity to their experience or point of view increases when you feel accepted and respected, in the first place. As psychologists are fond of saying, “acceptance paves the way for change.”
Fix #4: Remember that we gain influence by giving up control.
Mistake #5: We should be confident we know our partners and our relationships.
The brilliant Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky changed the way we think about what we think we know. That is, they helped us to recognize that we often make errors and that we are particularly error-prone in situations where we grow overconfident. And overconfidence in relationships is something we are all prone to. We get to know the people we are close to, their habits and our dynamics. And we begin to make assumptions that increase our efficiency. But that increase in efficiency sets us up not to check for errors. So, among all the things to keep in mind, it’s that a healthy dose of relationship humility—a variant of intellectual humility—is good for your relationship health. That is, it’s useful, no matter how expert we get at our partners and our relationships, to recognize that we are imperfect mind readers; that people we love, our relationships, and ourselves as ever-evolving; and that acknowledging our mistakes, shortcomings, and fallibility helps us learn more and connect better to people we love.
Fix #5: Adopt a relationally humble stance.
These pearls of wisdom from relationship science can help us foster healthier, more satisfying connections, even as our minds continue to trip us up because, well, we’re all human!
If you’re eager to explore more about how relationship science can help you thrive, consider subscribing to Relational Riffs.
1 Interested to learn more about biases in judgements and decision-making? Go directly to the source of this groundbreaking work in Kahneman’s incredible and incredibly readable book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
2 Curious to read more about errors we make in our close relationships? Check out Mindwise, Useful Delusions, and Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).
3 For a deep dive into how psychological reactance works—and how to work it better—as a parent, I highly recommend psychologist Emily Edlynn’s book, Autonomy-Supportive Parenting.
If you enjoyed Yael’s post, please leave a like. We’d love to hear your thoughts too!
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Selda, thank you for the terrific honor of guest posting in your incredible Substack!
Thank you for this piece. It really resonated with me. "What matters more in the process of connection is sensing that your partner is actually trying—that they genuinely care about your feelings and want to understand, even if they don’t." - this in particular is very powerful.