Your partner isn’t your competition
Are you and your partner fighting more than ever? Stop treating them like the competition in your life.
by: E.B. Johnson
If we’re looking to build relationships and friendships that last, we have to find better ways to connect and enjoy one another. The world we live in today encourages us to adopt a “me vs. them” way of thinking, or a highly individualized approach. We’re encouraged to put ourselves first, and see others as a threat to our personal sovereignty — rather than an important piece of it. This competitive thinking, though, leads to corruption and conflict which only makes us more unhappy over time.
How competitive thinking damages your relationship.
There are few things more toxic for a relationship than competitive thinking. You have to work as a team in order to build a life that works for both of you. Without this teamwork, battle lines get drawn and trust levels erode. You stop seeing one another as partners and come to see one another as adversaries in a corrosive relationship.
Manifesting battle lines
When we engage in “me vs. them” thinking, we actually draw battle lines where there don’t need to be any. Challenges are going to come our way in any relationship we have. Sometimes, we ‘re going to have differences and we’re going to disagree. In order to stay connected, we have to open up and work with one another across these differences — rather than seeing them as personal affronts which need to be punished or avenged.
Destroying trust
How can you trust someone who feels as though they are competing with you? Or trying to be superior to you in some way? Trick question: You can’t. For us to truly feel comfortable being vulnerable or trusting with someone, we have to know that they have our best interests at heart; wen need to know they want to lift us up. When they approach us as enemies, we come to believe that perhaps they don’t have the best intentions (and we’d be right).
Harboring resentment
Competitive thinking is so corrosive when it comes to the love and affection we hold for those in our lives. It pits you against one another and encourages negative emotions like resentment and contempt to lurk in the darkest edges of your partnership. We don’t love people we see as competition. We see them as roadblocks. This perspective to hand, it’s easy for the resentment to take over and divide us even further.
Creating a wedge
Looking at your relationship as a battle — and staring down the barrel of eroding trust and endless resentment — it’s not hard to understand why you and your partner might be driven away from one another. Life is a bumpy ride. If you and your partner don’t get situated with one another, one of you is likely to get thrown off along the way. Stop allowing yourselves to be divided by erroneous “me or you” thinking. Get back on the same page.
Uncomfortable isolation
Outside of our romantic relationships, competitive thinking has a way of destroying all our other relationships. If you can’t even look at someone you love without making it a competition, what are you likely to do with strangers and co-workers? We become miserable and competitive with everyone around us and it turns our entire lives into an exhausting (and unnecessary) battle that never ends. This turns people off, and it turns them away.
How to stop seeing your partner as competition.
You can’t hold on to the “me vs. them” mentality forever. This holding on will only bring you loneliness and heartbreak, so figure out why you’re engaging in these endless battles, and find a way to get back on the same page with the people who matter most. Then, you will be empowered to reconnect in joy and shift your perspective to a more positive point of view.
1. Look for your insecurities
In order to overcome your “me vs. them” mentality, you’re going to first have to look within at what leads you to adopt such outlooks. For some of us, our confrontational or competitive nature comes from a fountain of hurt that haunts us from the past. For others, it doesn’t run that deep. Either way, overcoming this divided perspective requires that we get down and dirty with any hangups that might be contributing to our competitive thinking.
Detach yourself from your relationship and any current thoughts; look at your emotions — then, look backward. Are they rooted in this moment, or is part of your response and behavior coming from a place in your past? Looking backward allows us to see old patterns and their originating point in our timeline.
What has caused you to see the people you love as enemies, rather than friends? Were you taught that loving someone wasn’t safe in childhood? Did toxic past relationships cause you to believe that you have to draw lines in the sand before the other person gets a chance? All of these answers are relevant, and can help us see the projections we’re placing on the world all around us. Once we look past our hangups, we can stop seeing our partners as competition and embrace them as allies.
2. Find your middle ground
Very frequently, we develop competitive thinking with our partner because we drift away from them and find ourselves in completely different places. Part of building a long-term relationship requires us to align our future goals and objectives. When we become divided on these core elements, our relationship stops feeling like a partnership and starts feeling like a competition. Both parties are pushing, but they’re pushing toward different things.
If you want to get yourselves back on the same journey, you need to get realigned and reacquainted with your mutual goals and objectives. That means sitting down and talking to one another, both about what’s going wrong and what’s going right. Do you both still want the same things from one another?
Once you have everything out on the table you can breathe easier and be honest with one another. That’s where the real work and compromise come into play. You can keep looking at one another as the person you have to work against, or you can make life easier for yourselves and get back on the same team consciously and with intentional healing. Open up. Be candid. Tell your partner what you want and then allow them to do the same.
3. Intentionally connect in joy
Piecing together a life with someone else isn’t easy. We all have different ways of looking at things, and we all have different needs when it comes to being seen, heard, and valued for who we are. That’s a lot to juggle when we’re also dealing with all the other stress and responsibility that comes with our lives outside of the relationship. To do this, we have to keep seeing one another in joy, and we can do that by getting excited with one another again.
Break yourselves out of the same old routine and find some excitement again. Make time together a regular thing and fill it full of new experiences, fun, and laughter. It’s easier to let your guard down with someone you enjoy being with, so learn how to enjoy simply being in the presence of one another again.
Drop the defensiveness. Be open to one another in the moment. Look for that person you first connected with, and let down your own walls. Life spent with someone else isn’t something that should be miserable. It’s work, sure, but it should be joy too. Make time to have fun together, and don’t just do it on special occasions or holidays. Come back together on a regular basis and give yourselves something to look forward to when you do. Break outside of the monotony.
4. Shift your perspective consciously
Getting to the root of your problems is certainly a starting place, and so is reconnecting with your partner in more positive ways. All of that only brings us so far, though, if we don’t consciously shift our perspective and commit to dropping our competitive way of thinking. Habits exist, and understanding where they come from only allows us to create more effective means of overcoming them. You still have to do the work of shedding the negativity.
Be more present and mindful about your intentions and your state of emotion. When you feel yourself sliding back into that defensive or combative way of seeing your partner — pull back. What positive thoughts and emotions can you create a road block out of? How can you stop this “me vs. them” approach and come from a more positive place?
Don’t allow yourself to go back into that place. Be aware of your thoughts and what you really want. Is battling your partner worth losing the future vision you’re building? Is seeing them as an enemy doing anything to repair the damage that’s lurking on the edge of your relationship? If the answer is no, then you have to put your foot down with our inner voice and put the comparisons and contempt to bed once and for all.
5. Embrace change as a good thing
When we fall in love with someone and build a life with them, many of us expect that life to stay the same forever. That’s just not possible, though, as we (as individuals) are always in a state of growth and change. We have to embrace this change and the differences it brings to our relationships. The alternative is coming to see ourselves at odds with someone we love; someone who is becoming a different, and better, version of themselves.
Are you in a state of panic? Do you see your partner changing, or see yourself changing within your relationship? Embrace it. Becoming different people doesn’t automatically mean you’re enemies. Changes are sometimes the greatest shift our partnerships can encounter.
Look for the silver lining. Stay open with one another and don’t hide your transformations together. You both deserve to bloom and blossom inside of your lives and your relationships. In order to grow, you’re going to have to become something bigger and better than you were before. Love that process for you, and love it for your partner. Don’t see their change as a divide, see it as a new bond.
Putting it all together…
When our relationships are tested or put into a state of change, we can find ourselves falling victim to a “me vs. them” way of thinking. This type of divisive perspective does nothing to make connection easier and only further pushes us away from our partners. In order to avoid major conflict and heartbreak, we have to actively shift our perspective and the way we connect with our other halves.
Figure out what hangups you are holding on to which allow you to see your relationships as competitions or combats, rather than loving and supportive environments. Then, sit down with your partner and get on the same page. What do each of you want? What’s changed? What’s gone wrong? You have to be candid with one another, and then you can come back to the middle and reconnect with joy. Get excited about your relationship again and get out of the tension by making time to have fun with one another. Love shouldn’t be all pain and all struggle. Give yourselves something to look forward, then commit to consciously shifting your perspective and the way you see your relationship changing. We are always in a state of growth. Embrace it and enjoy the ride for what it is.
- Hemfelt, R., Minirth, F., & Meier, P. (2003). Love Is a Choice: The Definitive Book on Letting Go of Unhealthy Relationships. Nashville, Tenn.: T. Nelson.