Never, Ever Take Your Significant Other for Granted, Part 1
I could write an entire book on this subject. But since I only have a few paragraphs to explain, I'll get right to the heart of the matter. If you take your spouse for granted, it is absolutely 100% guaranteed to adversely affect your relationship. I've never, ever met a single person who likes to be taken for granted. There are very few who would put up with it over the long run.
Clearly one of the most disrespectful and destructive things we could possibly do to our spouses or significant others or anyone is to take them for granted. To do so is sort of like saying, it's your job to make my life easier and my job to expect it. Ouch! That's arrogant. There are so many ways we can take our partners for granted. To mention a few, we can take our roles more seriously than theirs. We can think our contributions and our significance in the relationship makes our partners more lucky to have us. Commonly, many of us forget to say 'please' and 'thank you'. Some of us never do. We fail to reflect on how lucky we are to have each other and how sad and difficult it would be to live without our spouses. Sometimes we get very demanding of our spouses and significant others and we treat them differently than we do our friends. We are less patient with them. We snap with them frequently. Other times we speak for them or disrespectfully about them in front of others. Some of us think we know what our spouses think so we make decisions for them. Then there's a common mistake of coming to expect certain things, such as a clean house, a hot meal or money to pay the bills, or a nice clean cut lawn. We may think of these as our partner's responsibility. I'm finding that very few of us really listen to our spouses or share their excitements or disappointments unless, of course, it's matching something that we are interested in. Of course, I could go on and on at this point, but let's continue another time.