5 Strategies to Help Your Relationship Thrive Despite Its Flaws

Perfection is an impossible goal that can hurt your relationship. Instead of trying to reach for perfection, focus on growing and nurturing your relationship. Your relationship will never be perfect, but it can still be happy and strong.

Try these techniques and discover greater happiness together:

1. Avoid the comparison trap. Couples are frequently misled by this ruse. The comparison trap is when you’re constantly looking at other couples and trying to measure up to them. Instead of living your own life, you’re focused on other couples and trying to copy them.

• • Your relationship is unique, so what works for others may not work for you.
  • Your partner is also unique. You can’t compare them to others and expect to get accurate results.
  • Comparisons can make you doubt your relationship and try to change things that don’t need to be changed. They can make you feel inferior and defeated. They can make you feel ashamed.

2. Let go of chasing perfection. Perfection is simply not possible in any relationship. You may want to have an ideal relationship and the perfect partner, but these aren’t realistic goals. No one is perfect, and everyone has flaws. In addition, your idea of the ideal may not align with what your partner thinks.
3. Understand the reality of highlight reels. With social media, TV, and other media, today’s connected society makes it easy to take a peek into someone else’s relationship. However, you’re getting a highlight reel of their lives and not the grim details.

• • Keep in mind that these glimpses aren’t real pictures of relationships. They only show the best parts, such as gifts and happy photos. They ignore anger, disagreements, and tension. They suppress the negative emotions that are a real part of every relationship.
  • If you focus too much on these reels, then you may start to think that your relationship isn’t good enough.

4. Deal with the real issues that are causing you to search for more. Are you chasing perfection because of childhood trauma? Are you trying to be perfect because of how you feel at work or in other parts of your life?

• • Your relationship may not be the cause of your perfection obsession. It’s possible that you may have other things going on that force you to try to create an ideal relationship.
  • For example, you may be compensating for a bad work situation. Or you may be trying to achieve something that you saw in your parents’ home, but it’s not the right model for your relationship.
  • You may need therapy to get to the root cause.

5. Focus on what works. If you focus on the parts of your relationship that work, then you’re more likely to find happiness. Focus on the positive qualities of each other and the relationship itself.

• • As this focus becomes a way of life, you’ll discover even more things to be happy about with each other and in your relationship.

Your relationship doesn’t need perfection to thrive. Forget the relationships of others. Focus on love and growth in your own relationship and you’ll love the results!