Ever find yourself deep-diving into the endless abyss of relationship advice online while munching on some late-night snacks? Just last night, I was half-watching reruns and half-scrolling through stories about relationship mishaps, and boy, did it hit close to home. It’s like there’s a whole world of ‘oops’ moments out there that everyone but me seems to know to avoid. Not surprisingly, there is a subreddit r/AskReddit: “What was your simple common mistake that entirely ruined your relationship?” where many different people from many walks of life were willing to share their experiences. Why learn the hard way when you can laugh and learn from others not-so-little blunders in their responses below? Enjoy and maybe make some mental notes along the way!
#1 Focusing on all of the things they aren’t giving you instead all of the things they do give you. (I’m in a happy marriage, but I did used to do this. I became happier and our marriage became stronger when I stopped).
#2 I was a “if they want me to know, they’ll tell me” person married to a “if they care about me, they’d ask” person.
#3 Having to be right about everything.
#4 Not spending quality time together. Those were the times that I was so drained by my job that I don’t even had the energy to do my skincare. All I wanted to do is to sleep after a very tiring day. I’m a sleepyhead btw. We rarely meet each other. I feel bad every time I wasn’t able to meet him. “If she wants to, she will.” is easier to be said than done. Until one day, he fell out of love.
#5 Oversharing. I know that with your partner you should be able to talk about everything. But sometimes I should kept my mouth shut.
#6 Telling my friends about all of our fights.
#7 Lack of communication, he never told me about what he thought or how he feels about our relationship. Those feelings just compounded over time until he ultimately called it quits.
I wish he talked to me, we could’ve figured it out together. I was always in the dark and didn’t even see the break up coming. Hurts, but I think it was just meant to be.
Communicate with your partner, be transparent. Helps both parties.
#8 Took a nap one day, she thought I was cheating . Big blowup argument I found out she was cheating on me.
#9 Choose who you let in to your life carefully. Even people who initially have good intentions can end up taking a lot away from you. Even losing something as simple and intangible as your inner peace can end up being a much longer term thing than initially occurs to us.
#10 Accommodation to avoid any conflict. At the time I was working through a lot of childhood trauma and I didn’t know better, now I do. I lost my identity trying endlessly to please him so he wouldn’t abandon me, but he was going to do that anyway. You can’t and shouldn’t have to earn love from people, and them betraying and disrespecting you is a cue to exit, not a sign to “try harder.”.
#11 Taking her for granted.
#12 I was too nice. I did way too much…way too fast.
#13 Constantly asking for bare minimum. You feel like s**t for asking, they feel s**t because they feel that you’re nagging them. The cba attitude is really unattractive and it ain’t your person. Just walk away and have peace for yourself.
#14 We had a baby we were both unprepared for.
#15 Getting too comfortable with doing the bare minimum. Take her on dates and buy her flowers before you wish you could again.
#16 Jealousy. I made this mistake for years.
#17 In my last relationship, I was with someone who had an addiction. Since I had tried light d***s before, the whole relationship brought me down. When I got out of that relationship and met someone new who was super nice and decent, I messed things up by telling him about my past d**g use upfront. He made it clear that he didn’t approve of it. I told him I would stop and that I wouldn’t let something silly like that ruin a good relationship. After 3 months of being together, he wanted some space to figure out how to proceed because of his stressful job, frequent travel, and recent divorce. I gave him the space, but then I slipped back into d**g use myself. Long story short: I lost a great man because of d***s.
#18 Not saying sorry here and there.
#19 Prioritizing future too much.
#20 Staying quiet waiting for the appropriate time to communicate. Created an unneeded stressful environment that could have been avoided by just talking it through immediately. Thought I was doing the right thing by waiting for a better time.
#21 Told her the truth about me being bi, and she always held it against me. But my daughter came out as pan and she didn’t bat an eye.
#22 He told us we shouldn’t talk to our individual friends about our relationship issues because they’ll “always take our side”. 3 days before our breakup he talked to 2 friends about our relationship issues and yes, they took his side. Meanwhile I’d been telling my friends everything was fine with us when it wasn’t, and looking back if I had spoken to friends about it I would’ve had the strength to break things off a lot sooner.
#23 Not immediately stopping the wedding when he said “Once we’re married, the mask comes off.” I stupidly assumed it was a joke.
#24 She expected me to know why she was mad at me without communicating to me AT ALL about what was bothering her. I’m completely open to correcting reasonable things that bother a partner, but I can’t do that if you don’t tell me what it is. I broke up with her after she was all pissy and telling me I should know exactly why she’s mad for TWO DAYS. Eventually she relented and told me she was mad that I watched a new episode of a show we normally watched together. Which, granted, I did do. But that was the final straw in the no communication issues we had.
#25 She kept fallin onto other dudes dongs, I hate it when that happens.
#26 Doing too f*****g much, and getting *nothing* in return.
I did this grown mand laundry, I cooked, I cleaned, I bathed the animals, he did f**k all except cheat on me.
When I asked why he didn’t leave because, clearly, he didn’t love me. He said “I just loved having someone to come home to.
Now in happily married and we just had our daughter. He still stalks me on social media, I’m sure because he had a million burner accounts and I couldn’t possibly remember the names for all of them to block them.
#27 Assuming they’d do something that they said they would. Honestly, that’s my bad.
#28 Mistaking a relationship for competition. It’s can be so subtle. ‘Where would you be without me?’, ‘I told you so’, ‘I was right’. We play it off as sarcastic teasing but when ‘winning’ becomes a source of joy, disagreement and constructive criticism can seem like an offense.
#29 Lack of communication from fear of rejection. This pent-up a lot of resentment and hurt and ultimately led to the breakup. I regret leaving.
#30 I’ve tanked a lot of relationships by thinking everything needed to be fixed. I almost did it in the one I’m in. He’s in a bad mood, he’s being snappy with me, we need to fix this, I need to sit down and have a heart to heart, I need to COMMUNICATE that he’s hurting my feelings right now. I’m overly therapised and really thought this was the best way to handle everything.
My current SO and I went through a lot of therapy apart and together ironically to work on this because, with him, this is what happens. He gets angry and stews and stews and will never bring the thing up to me until I coax it out of him. The suggested way to handle this was, surprisingly, less communication.
I feel like we’re in a better place when he can be acting like a total reactive jerk and instead of being like “have I upset you? I must have because you’re treating me really weirdly and you’re in an awful mood. I just want to get to the bottom of this!!” I can be like “You’re vibe is positively a*s, you need to take a nap or something. If I did something to upset you that’s making you act like this I’ll be open to talk about it later today, but right now I think we’re both just annoyed. I’m gonna go do the rest of my day alone, I hope you feel better.”
Then I get home and it’s 50/50 “yeah I’m sorry, you did this thing last week that really upset me and I’ve taken time to think about how I want to address it calmly” and “Yeah I have no idea what that was about, I think I didn’t get enough breakfast and it made me moody. I’m glad you had a good day after that!” but either way we’re both totally calm by the time we talk about it.
#31 Thinking that other person cares.
#32 Trying to communicate with someone who couldn’t receive or recognize healthy communication, and then not ending things as soon as he turned resentful and cold towards me, but foolishly thinking that somehow we could communicate as to why he was suddenly treating me poorly. Even if you create a safe space for communication, if the other person isn’t willing to do so, it’s pointless. It’s silly now to think that “I ruined the relationship” for being open and transparent.