How to Stop Resenting Your Partner

I can’t think of a mum I’ve worked with who didn’t resent their partner when we started working together. 

They think they do way more than their spouse. They envy the free time their partner has, or the naps they take, or the way they breeze out the door to work... They stomp around the house doing everything, thinking if they do enough (and stomp loud enough), their partner will eventually notice.

Maybe they’ll finally say thank you, or maybe they’ll actually pull their weight. 

I want to teach you about a concept I use called The Manual. I’m sure it will sound familiar once I explain it, because we all have manuals for people in our lives, especially our partners. 

So a manual is an invisible instruction guide we have for someone in our life about how we want them to behave so we can be happy and feel good. We usually don’t tell the other person what’s in our manual and often we don’t even know we’ve got a manual for them. But we usually feel that the other person should just “know” what to do and how to treat us.

So things like, “He should take out the bin. He should offer to make me a cup of tea in the morning. He should take the kids out and come up with his own ideas of what to do with them. He should massage my feet at night.” These might be just some of the points in your manual.

You think you’d be happier if your partner would change their behaviour. If they packed the kids’ bags, or did more laundry, or did the dishes without being asked, you’d feel so much better.

But this is a huge cause of your suffering, because you’re handing how you feel over to someone else and how they’re behaving. And they probably aren’t changing in the way you want them to, so you continue to feel resentful.

Other people’s behaviour has zero impact on us until we think about it and choose to make it mean something. You might be making it mean, “He doesn’t care enough about me. He can’t see how tired I am. He doesn’t love our kids as much as I do.”

You might have been giving your happiness away to your partner for a long time, and it’s probably hard to see at the moment that this is voluntary or unnecessary. You’re still sure they need to change how they’re acting for you to feel good. 

But now you know about your invisible manual, you can start observing what’s in it and how you think you’d feel if your partner finally followed it. 

If you want to talk more about how to find happiness without your partner changing a thing, you can set up a complimentary consult with me here.