When Your Partner Starts to Bother You

3 minutes

Written and verified by the psychologist Fátima Servián Franco.

Last update: 18 April, 2024

Over a relatively short period of time, reality imposes itself on us and takes away the filter of idealization. The person who you thought would present a certain attitude or behavior reveals themselves to be just another imperfect human, with all their virtues and flaws. These flaws seem to amplify over time, leading to situations where things you used to enjoy are now starting to bother you.

Idealizing another person can end up frustrating you due to the overly high expectations that you had of them at the beginning of the relationship. Everything starts to change when you realize that you created a character based on that person. As the relationship develops, you stop idealizing your partner, giving you a different perspective on the relationship.

According to Erich Fromm, if you want to learn how to love, you have to approach it like you would if you were learning any other kind of art, such as music, painting, carpentry, or even medicine or engineering.

Romantic relationships are like an art. They require you to be mature, to understand that differences are inevitable, and that things won’t always be ideal. They need to be nurtured, understood, and fair. You must see that both of you have to go through a personal learning process.

If you’re going to share your feelings, you need to connect with, understand, and take care of the other person. That way, you won’t be stuck searching for something to meet the needs that you don’t know how to fill.

Romantic love

In a romantic relationship, each person might understand love in a different way. For example, one partner might tend more towards infantile love, following the principle “I love them because they love me.” The other might lean more towards mature love, following the principle “they love me because I love them.”

Relationships bases on immature love tend to be made up of people who love because they need the other person. In relationships where mature love takes precedence, people need each other because they love each other.

As relationships develop, characteristics about the other person start to show that didn’t used to bother you, or that you even liked. But now, not only do you not like them, but they’re really starting to annoy you. At the beginning of the relationship, you tried to please the other person all the time, putting your own desires on the back burner.

In romantic relationships, both people are part of the problem and part of the solution.

Why are these things starting to bother you?

People are wrong to think that their partner’s irritating defects are just their partner’s own problem. In reality, they always presented behaviors that bothered them, but they just didn’t express it at first. The idealization of one’s partner, along with the desire to avoid conflict, causes people to ignore irritating or unpleasant details.

If everything is starting to bother you, it might have more to do with a change in you than a change in your partner. All relationships go through different stages, and negative situations can sometimes make you think that the relationship isn’t what you expected.

The combination of a lack of communication, frequent arguments, and sexual or emotional problems in the relationship is the perfect breeding ground for things you liked previously to start to bother you. To reverse the situation, you have to try to be more accepting and intimate with your partner.