50 Marriage Counselors On The Most Common Mistakes Couples Make

1. Unspoken family rules that you bring into relationship are HUGE.

Obviously you didn’t grow up together and depending on how you did you grow up you may have had completely different family of origin (FOO) experiences. It can be as simple as your FOO separated out laundry by color and your SO’s just threw everything in together so you have different family rules regarding laundry, to your FOO had the rule of “family problems stay in the family” and your SO’s family talked to people outside the family about all the problems freely.

Everybody has these rules, talking about them and uncovering them (without judgement) will go a very long way in maintaining and deepening connection. If you don’t talk about them it is easy to get into negative interactional patterns that are just rehearsals of how your FOO did things and not creating healthy, mutually safe patterns.

Also, I recommend that everyone in relationship take an attachment style quiz and compare their attachment style (secure, anxious, or avoidant) because that reveals a lot of unspoken rules as well.

2. Discussing really important decisions / making these decisions via text messages.

3. Adopting a ‘tit for tat’ policy – One should aim to put their 100% commitment into a relationship for the sake of the relationship itself and not because they expect returns sooner or later.