Are you obsessed with keeping the scales equally balanced in all sorts of interpersonal relationships? Surely, keeping score is appropriate in sports games, but it never helps foster a meaningful relationship. When you keep score in your marital relationship, it will only lead to misunderstanding and resentment. No doubt, keeping score is a common but toxic relationship pattern.
If you wonder how to stop keeping score in marriage, here are 7 tips:
1 Explain instead of blaming:
Rather than keep score, it is better to explain to your spouse. Understandably, you may try to let your spouse better understand your feelings by keeping score, but on the contrary, it often keeps your innermost feelings away from your spouse, and this result is also not what you expect at all.
And you might put yourself into your spouse’s shoes: if he/she exactly understood that you were feeling not valued and respected when he/she assumed that you could easily wash up all the dishes while he/she was sitting watching TV, probably he/she would be willing to pitch in. Instead of annoying at yourself without saying anything, you might open your mouth to tell him/her what it means to you, why you need help, why it upsets you, and so on. Surely, in that case, to keep scorekeeping at bay, you are supposed to avoid saying things like “I have washed dishes for a week, but this month you just did it for one day…” Saying that can easily stimulate your spouse to compare with your overall score.
If you apply this method into your marital life, you will soon find out that it is more effective in getting your spouse to do household chores than accusing your spouse of being selfish or lazy.
2 Be objective rather than be biased:
The act of keeping score inhibits your ability to empathize with your spouse. After all, there can not be the supervision of a referee in such a score-keeping game; while you are acting as the player, you are also acting as a referee to record points you scored.
Therefore, it is inevitable that you are kind of biased towards yourself – you deliberately find fault with your spouse to criticize him/her, and you think that it is a good opportunity to score points for you. Gradually, you may have gotten accustomed to making yourself blind to things that he/she did well. And the more you unfairly focus on the negative side of your spouse, the more tempted you are to keep score with your spouse.
Likewise, if you choose to shift your focus from your spouse’s bad side to the good side, you will quickly realize that he/she is not so bad, and you will have to admit that you gave your spouse low marks when he/she was handling many things. So, if you decide to stop keeping score in your marriage, you may set the intention to notice more things your spouse did that were generous, kind, and helpful for you.
3 Don’t be over-reactive:
Probably you have heard the idiom “making a mountain out of a molehill”. If you make too much of a variety of minor issues in a relationship, things are apt to be blown out of proportion. Especially when you spend too much time focusing on minor things that make little sense, you can easily get in the habit of keeping score. These two habits (being over-reactive and keeping score) are both toxic to a relationship and closely linked. It is easy to understand: when you frequently exaggerate a minor problem, conflict is more likely to arise. You see, it is very common that a spouse keeps score in escalated conflict when his/her basic instinct for self-justification or self-protection is triggered to prove his/her “rightness” to the other one.
4 Embrace an abundance model instead of a scarcity model:
You must remember that keeping score messed up many things that could have been easily handled; a big reason is that the scorekeeping is an either-or, or zero-sum game. In such a game, you either have a sense of “enough” or have a sense of “not enough”. It suggests that if you can not do something that you want to do, you will instantly feel unfulfilled in the relationship. Understandably, no one can score all the time in a zero-sum game; once you feel that you fail to score your expected points, your mindset will be stuck in a scarcity model, and you will feel unhappy with your spouse. Hence, keeping score should be viewed as a sure sign of an unhappy marriage.
Anyway, as long as you no longer hold a scarcity model and start to apply an abundance model to your relationship, you are going to see improvements in your relationship sooner or later. The abundance model means that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. For a person who is happily living in an abundance model of relationship, he/she thinks that the more he/she gives to his/her partner, the more they (both he/she and his/her partner) can have ultimately; as you change your mindset in this way, mutual trust can pervade every aspect of the marital life, thereby getting rid of pettiness or hostility in the relationship.
5 Be generous:
Marriage is a “give and take” relationship – marital satisfaction not only comes from receiving but also comes more from giving. When you have no idea how to stop keeping score in marriage, you might try to make more contributions in your married life without intending to get things back; when you face your life with the attitude of peace and gratitude, it feels cozier.
As long as you take a step forward in loving him/her unconditionally, gradually you will feel how different it is from consciously attaching strings to love – you will be amazed that you can become much happier, and you will both be pleased to allow such a positive pattern to grow and develop in your relationship. Most likely, when your spouse realizes that you are becoming generous to him/her rather than keep interested in keeping score, he/she will reflect upon himself/herself, and probably he/she will think that the/she does also have to haggle over every ounce for every little thing all days.
6 Think “we”, not “me”:
A person is bound to get all worked up when finding that he/she is just being taken advantage of by someone after he/she pays a lot for someone. And if you constantly stay in the “scorekeeping” mode with your spouse, sooner or later you will have similar feelings. For example, when you realize that you have done a lot more household chores than your spouse but that your effort has not been acknowledged, have you ever felt like being taken advantage of.
However, if you love your spouse and know that he/she loves you too, even though you have gone to the extra mile to get something done (e.g. cooking more dishes, clearing up rooms more often, and spending more time to look after children), it will be much less probable that you will initially think that your spouse is cunningly carrying out a nefarious plot to intentionally get you to do more chores than him/her, it is because you embrace your marriage as a team and you strongly believe that he/she does not mean to let you suffer or get you into trouble.
Therefore, to stop keeping score, you should learn to be a “we” couple instead of a “me” couple. The “me” couple operates as two distinct individuals that happen to be in a relationship, and the “we” couple is a two-person team.
When you treat yourself as the 50 percent of the duo, you may have sharply different views about the same relationship issue; when a problem occurs, you will actively act as a bringer of “we” into it – invite both of you to be a solution maker. For example, when you two are both exhausted but you notice that the sink is still full of dirty dishes, what immediately comes to your mind is “how should we solve this?”, and you immediately report the problem to your spouse, and eventually you choose to work together to wash up the full load of dishes (there is another case: one of you chooses to finish the task alone and asks the other to go to rest first; surely, whether the willing worker is you or your spouse, no complaint or resentment will be created during the whole process).
However, if one thing like the example above happened to a marriage that lacks teamwork spirit, most likely the couple would start to keep score again. So when it comes to how to stop keeping score in marriage, developing teamwork is one of the most significant points; as a married couple, you should also strive to improve your marriage with teamwork. For more tips on how to be a team with your spouse, you might go on to read the post below:
How to be a team with your spouse – Develop teamwork in marriage.
7 Compare yourself to yourself:
Rather than keep score in the relationship, you may keep the score within you. For example, you might remind yourself from time to time how good you are being to your spouse, or that how much passion and energy you are putting into your marriage… It is a good way to improve your inner self. Furthermore, when your spouse feels that you are trying to become warmer, more generous, more kind-hearted, more passionate…, probably he/she will be inspired and then consider reciprocating you. No doubt, reciprocation is better than scorekeeping. And the more you receive the feelings of gratefulness and being loved, the more you will be motivated to continue the upward spiral in your love relationship.
The final word:
When one party frequently uses the “relationship scoreboard”, tension and resentment grow in the relationship inevitably. And when you are keeping score, you may not notice that you look just like a tiger who is ready to pounce on your prey (in this case, the prey is your spouse) for any mistakes that he/she carelessly makes. And ultimately, you are very likely to feel miserable and even guilty about having had such behavior that badly damaged the relationship.
An important aspect of a long-lasting marital relationship is mutual happiness, not about keeping everything completely balanced and keeping score. After stopping keeping score, the marriage can further thrive.
In short, don’t run the marriage like a ledger because it will never balance; for more tips on how to save your marriage life and make it thrive again, you might go on to watch the presentation below to follow the comprehensive marriage-saving guidance that is provided by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience; it wants you to understand that you and your spouse should be a solid team without the need to keep score; and what is more, it will teach you how to build teamwork in your marriage even if you two feel like opposites:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
How to resolve power struggle in marriage – How to move forward
6 tips on how to make up with your spouse after a fight.
How to fight fair with your spouse – Fight in a healthy way.
How to reduce arguments in a marriage – Reconnect your spouse.
How to deal with constant criticism in marriage
How to keep your marriage alive – Maintain a happy long term marriage.