Health Picking on your partner, manuka, scents

Relationship and personal development guru DR DAIN HEER reveals why we need to stop pointing out their faults

We’re all guilty of picking out our loved one’s faults, and we often don’t even mean to. Perhaps they’re untidy around the house, they have a terrible memory or they chew too loud.

Whatever their “faults”, Dr Dain Heer wants us to stop picking on our partners. Here’s why and how!

The damage

“You can either have gratitude or judgement towards people,” says Dr Heer. “And in order to pick out someone’s faults, you have to judge. When you judge, you destroy closeness and build walls. Divorces occur because of the walls of separation that build over the years because of those judgements each partner has. When you lose the gratitude, you lose the relationship, because judgement is really destructive.”

Working past the problems

While it’s not about simply accepting your partner’s faults, Dr Heer explains we should all be grateful for them just as they are. “The difficulty is we can often believe our own point of view is right and we’re somehow ‘perfect’, and we start to see our partner as ‘wrong’.”

So how can we stop ourselves from doing that? “One way to stop picking at your partner’s faults is to start writing a gratitude list,” says Dr Heer.

“Write down three things you’re grateful for every day about your partner.

“It could be anything, from their contribution to the household financially, how caring they are or the fact that they’re a great parent to your children. Gratitude trumps judgement every ery time and the more you focus on gratitude, the more those things you considered to be faults won’t even enter into your mind.”

Deal-breakers

While it’s possible to move past some of what you deem are ‘faults’ with your partner, there are of course times when they can become deal-breakers and leave the relationship unsalvageable. “You could seek