MO AND PHINDI | Are you walking on eggshells in your relationship?

Do you sometimes struggle to be yourself around your partner; express your true feelings; or assert your boundaries? Like no matter what you say, it is taken as a criticism and erupts in unhealthy and toxic behaviour?

Do you feel you have to be really careful or you’re going to get “in trouble” for saying or doing something the wrong way and then get blamed? Are you constantly worried about offending or angering your partner by expressing your true feelings?

That’s “walking on eggshells”, or when a person needs to carefully watch what they say or do around their partner for fear of how the partner may respond.

Walking on eggshells is generally a misguided attempt at preserving a relationship. It’s when you’re afraid of expressing your more vulnerable thoughts and feelings out of fear that you won’t be heard or understood and that it will somehow cause conflict or arguing in the relationship.

While in some relationships, walking on eggshells can be a sign that the relationship is damaged beyond repair, in others, the relationship can be improved considerably by introducing healthy communication. Walking on eggshells shouldn’t necessarily spell an end of the relationship. Many couples are able to healthily fight through it. If your partner is willing to work on communicating productively, your relationship can gain new skills that remove the need for you to micromanage your words and actions.

But if walking on eggshells becomes a pervasive pattern in your relationship it leaves both partners feeling alone and misunderstood.

Here’s how you know you’re walking on eggshells in your relationship:

You’re always afraid of upsetting your partner

It’s impossible to be in an intimate relationship without occasionally upsetting or setting your partner off. As flawed human beings, we’re wired to get upset and behave irrationally on occasion.

You suppress yourself

This is different from self-discipline. Suppression is an act of pushing down or blocking out genuine thoughts, or authentic feelings for fear of how they may affect your partner. It has to do with bottling up your emotions and leaves you feeling trapped. It’s when you resist and fight against your desires, keeping them as buried and unexpressed as possible.

Self-discipline is when your highest desires rule your lesser desires, not through resistance, but through loving action grounded in understanding and compassion. It is an act of maturity and the conscious act of regulating your thoughts, emotions, or behaviours. It’s not driven by fear, but rather involves making a deliberate choice to resist impulses or temptations in order to achieve a goal or maintain self-discipline.

You second-guess yourself

You find yourself unable to make strong decisions on your own, without fearing how your partner will react to them. You lose faith in your own ability to be competent or successful at what you do. Constant criticism and living in fear eat away at our self-esteem, which means that every time you think of doing anything, we second-guess ourselves.

You tiptoe around your partner

You often find yourself having to nurse their feelings and emotions – at the detriment of your own – in order to avoid blowouts. You constantly feel like you have to monitor your words and actions, and aren’t true to yourself.

You’re constantly apologising

No matter what you do, you feel like you’re constantly upsetting your partner. And then they react in a manner that leaves no room for communication or clarification. It’s almost always that you have to apologise. You often refrain from saying things you think they won’t understand because you know, it will eventually lead to a fight where you will have to be the bigger person. They also get angry at the slightest provocation.

Your relationship has no equality

If your partner is constantly critical of you, you don’t share a healthy connection. There is no equality or respect. Even if there is respect, it is forced rather than natural. And while you can respect someone without loving them, you cannot love someone without respecting them. Soon, it becomes a dominant-submissive relationship where you are the constant submissive.

When you’re constantly treading on eggshells around your partner, you realise that you’re mostly giving up all your power to them all the time. When you’re always trying to please them, to mold yourself into someone they’ll be happy with, but getting nothing in return, your relationship is completely and unhealthily out of balance.