Dealing with Annoyances in Your Relationship? Psychology Experts on How—and Whether—to Tackle Them

When your partner hasn’t wiped down the bathroom countertop in days, when they put on their shoes and then walk on the freshly mopped floors!; when you love listening to your favorite podcast while you cook, but your partner glances with exasperation from the next room, where they’re trying to watch TV. 

Small annoyances are a par for the course in any close relationship—but when you’re talking about a romantic partner, possibly one you live with, then there’s a chance they set you off, oh, say, a handful of times a week.

The good news: For the most part, these differences are normal, and largely innocuous. But we’re also living in a time when women are having a real reckoning with partnership. U.S. women are the ones initiating nearly 70% of divorces, according to data cited by the BBC in 2022, as research shows topics like household division of labor and other everyday issues tend to be more common drivers of dissatisfaction than “big” problems, like infidelity. The minor but chronic stressors can take their toll, as a woman calculates whether she’d have more peace if she ran the household solo—as in, single.

“When these differences are pushed under the rug, ignored and allowed to happen over and over again, they turn into patterns leading to resentment, negativity and more frequent arguments,” Toni Coleman, LCSW, a psychotherapist and relationship coach, tells MyLifetime. 

In the moments that little things feel like they’re about to break you, here’s how relationship psychotherapists—and one divorce mediator—recommend you manage the annoyances in your relationship.

Tina Tessina, PhD, a psychotherapist and author of How to Be Happy Partners: Working It Out Together recommends you ask yourself: “What is the problem? Are you clear about it? What would you like for a solution? Can you communicate it without being angry?” 

If you feel like you can’t let it go, then make a plan about when you want to talk, and determine  your ask. Sooner tends to be better. “Addressing things at the outset gives your partner the opportunity to know it is an issue and respond with a discussion about possible compromises and a comfortable middle ground,” Coleman tells MyLifetime. That reduces the likelihood of it blowing up into something bigger.

If you thought you could get over it, but you can’t—which happens—then address it. Stewing silently might be normal, but it's not good. "I see the consequences all the time," Coleman says. "When couples reach out for help, it's because small resentments were never raised and, over time, built up into a loss of affection, respect and even trust." 

That can lead to a relationship in which you're living like roommates. "What those couples describe are frequent arguments over ‘small’ things, and a sense that neither of them is listening to the other or cares how the other feels,” she says.

Think about how to position your complaint from a gentle “I” perspective. (For instance, instead of saying, “You keep leaving the seat up,” word it as, “I find that I keep putting the seat down.”) That way, you’re speaking “from a place of how you are feeling about what is occurring,” Coleman says. “Speaking directly to a person's behavior can come across as accusatory, raising their defenses and making their comeback more likely to be angry and retaliatory.” That’s how small complaints can spiral out of control.

And while you want to be timely in bringing it up, demanding an instant fix may not actually yield a solution. Dr. Tessina suggests you give it some time so you can thoughtfully work out the issue together. This may allow you both a little space to contemplate and find something that can really stick, or at least move closer to a permanent resolution.

The obvious thought might be to compromise—but that shouldn’t always be the goal here, Dr. Tessina says. “Compromise is giving up something for the sake of the relationship, and that sacrifice can come back to haunt you,” she tells MyLifetime. 

Instead, focus on cooperation. That might sound like a matter of semantics, but, as Dr. Tessina puts it, cooperation involves working together to solve a problem, finding a mutually agreeable solution, and then implementing it together.

Coleman says this means you work together to find a shared middle ground. When she asks her couples clients what that might be, she says, “They seem surprised by the question, as they had become so entrenched in ‘winning’ that they had forgotten no one wins until both win,” she says.

Of course, this discussion can be tougher in practice, especially if you’ve been asking your partner for weeks to stop tracking dirt in from the backyard. That’s where reflective listening,  in which “each person takes a turn speaking while the other listens without any interruption,” can help, Coleman says.  When they are finished, their partner paraphrases back what they heard.” 

Then, you switch, and the partner gets to respond and ask questions. 

This can help you get through the discussion without it turning into an argument or resulting in one of you shutting down and walking away—all to take the petty grievances out of your relationship.