Resentment is a natural response to unfairness, which can strain relationships if not addressed. To deal with resentment towards your partner: understand its root causes, focus on your needs, practice gratitude, and communicate openly about differences. Acknowledge the emotion and consider seeking professional help if needed. Taking action to create a more balanced relationship is key to overcoming resentment.
How To Deal With Resentment Towards Your Partner
How to deal with resentment towards your partner – it’s a question many of us ask at some point, especially after becoming parents. In fact, it’s more common than most people expect. Resentment can feel uncomfortable to admit, let alone talk about. But it’s a natural response when your life has changed more than your partner’s and the way you’re dividing your roles and responsibilities feels unfair.
You might notice it in small moments. A comment that lands badly. The dishwasher being loaded “wrong”. That feeling of doing more, holding more, or caring more – and not quite being met in the same way.
If you’ve been wondering how to deal with resentment towards your partner, you’re in the right place. This post will help you to think about what’s really going on underneath, and to understand what actually helps.
The Poison of Resentment: Recognising and Understanding the Emotion
You’ve probably heard the famous line (attributed variously) that “resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die”.
This idea makes sense, because if resentment is left to build – turning into seething or ranting without managing to change anything – it can become corrosive.
However, resentment is a feeling like any other, and feelings are messengers about needs.
Resentment is the feeling of bitter indignation that we experience when things feel unfair.
It’s natural to feel angry or annoyed when things don’t feel fair!
In fact, the physical sensations in our bodies that we recognise as resentment are how we know something isn’t right.
They’re how we know that something needs to change.
So next time you feel resentful, try not to judge the emotion.
Ask yourself this instead: what do I need?
How To Deal With Resentment Towards Your Partner: Addressing Your Needs – Shifting Focus and Practicing Gratitude
When we’re feeling resentful, we usually feel like someone else is getting a better deal than us.
So what do you need, to redress the balance?
The answer might not be obvious straight away. Perhaps you just know something feels off, like you’re doing more than your share, or giving more than you’re getting back.
Often one or both partners get stuck, thinking “it’s alright for you”, focusing on what their partner is or isn’t doing or getting.
When you shift the focus to what YOU want and need – and practice gratitude for what you have – things start to look different.
It can help to think about it like this: if you were getting what you needed and wanted, would you feel resentful of your partner getting what they need and want?
Each of us is responsible for our own happiness, even though it doesn’t always feel that simple.
Of course, there are limits on time, money etc. – especially when we have young children – so we can’t always all get what we want, at least not at the same time.
The causes of resentment can’t always be fixed overnight.
But thinking of resentment as poison won’t help you; feeling the emotion and acknowledging what it’s there to tell you will.
Then you can work out what you need to relieve it. (My free 7-step action plan out of resentment and short course The Contented Relationship Guide can help with that.)
Differences and Disagreements: Do They Fuel Resentment?
“If I were to air how I feel… the worst thing that could happen would be to bring my ‘war’ out into the open where it could be waged more intelligently. And we might even come to a better understanding…” – Perls, Hefferline & Goodman
Sometimes resentment builds up when we’ve been struggling to deal with differences in opinions, expectations, or how we each approach important matters like parenting.
Ideally, both partners would feel free to say what they think and feel. But when you’re not confident that you’ll be able to either reach a place of genuine agreement or agree to disagree, this can difficult.
Do you or your partner ever sulk, withdraw, get offended, pretend to agree just to keep the peace, or brush issues under the carpet?
Being two different people with different coping styles can be hard sometimes!
You might worry about the differences between you, ask for lots of reassurance that you’re okay, or even try to mould yourself to fit what you think your partner wants from you.
Or maybe you get caught up in arguments about who’s “right” and who’s “wrong”, neither of you feeling heard.
How To Deal With Resentment Towards Your Partner: Learning To Face Our Differences For A Healthier Relationship
The trouble with avoiding conflict – or repeating patterns of highly escalated conflict – is that disagreements are actually good for us!
As long as we air them in ways which respect each other’s opinions, desires, and responsibilities, differences in our points of view keep a relationship alive, and both partners growing.
Strong feelings of either – or both – guilt and resentment can be a sign that you’re struggling with differences between you and your partner internally, instead of getting them out in the open.
Resentment creeps in when we’re not being fully open with each other about our wants and needs – or not staying with it long enough to get to meaningful change.
It sometimes happens when we’re afraid to let each other see our whole selves, with our whole range of desires (including ones which are inconvenient to our partners).
You’re two different people, so of course you have differences, and they’re going to present challenges.
Do you want to know how to deal with resentment towards your partner? Part of learning to deal with it is finding a way to share how you feel, and what you want and need. It’s a skill to do this constructively, and with confidence that your feelings, wants and needs are as valid as your partner’s.
Another part of the process is to ask them how they feel and what they want and need, with the same openness to hearing about it and taking it seriously that you want from them.
To be truly close, we have to be authentic and open, including to our differences.
If you want to work on this, talking with a relationship therapist can help.
The Dangers Of Being Agreeable
“Resentment. It’s the consequence of our own agreeableness, anger stuck in a loop. It’s the hatred we suppress when we are forbidden to give voice to the ways we are hurt or humiliated or frustrated.” – Tiffany Watt Smith
Tiffany Watt Smith goes on to describe resentment as “an emotion which ‘seethes’ and is ‘buried’. And is harboured by lurkers and keyhole-listeners, who aren’t brave enough to show their true feelings, but take a perverse sort of pleasure in feeling hard-done-by, by not wanting to tell others what the problem is lest it be resolved.”
It can feel a bit uncomfortable to read something like that – especially when you’re already trying your best.
It feels at risk of blaming or shaming to me, but worth taking on board and thinking through.
Are you brave enough to show your true feelings in your relationship?
What might hold you back?
The parents I work with don’t seem to take much pleasure in feeling hard-done-by.
When they come to me, they’re usually struggling to understand what exactly what is happening between them in their more difficult moments. Battling to explain them to each other. And making efforts to resolve them, then getting frustrated when things slip back.
How Trying To SuppressResentment Keeps You Feeling Stuck
Tiffany Watt Smith goes on to tell us how Nietzsche described resentment as “an emotion obsessed with compensation rather than action”.
That reminded me of Perls, Hefferline and Goodman saying that;
“Guilt is the self-punitive, vindictive attitude toward oneself when one assumes responsibility… resentment is the demand that the other person feel guilty.”
How does that sit with you?
Do you want your partner to feel guilty? (It’s a difficult question, but might be an important one to sit with.)
Or do you want action?
Change?
The question is: what keeps you agreeable?
What stops you from giving voice to the ways in which you feel hurt, or humiliated, or frustrated?
If you want to know how to deal with resentment towards your partner, the answer might be on the other side of those questions.
It can be difficult to talk about these feelings, especially if you’ve been getting caught up in repeated patterns of conflict or withdrawal. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like my support with that.
How To Deal With Resentment Towards Your Partner: Strategies For A Healthier Relationship
Resentment isn’t the problem – it’s a sign.
If you’re feeling resentful towards your partner, it usually means something important needs attention. Perhaps it’s a need that hasn’t been expressed, a difference that hasn’t been worked through, or a dynamic that no longer feels okay for you.
Learning how to deal with resentment towards your partner isn’t about suppressing the feeling or just trying to think more positively. It’s about understanding what’s underneath it, and finding ways to respond that create more balance and connection.
If parts of this felt familiar, that awareness could be the beginning of something changing for you.
But remember, resentment is a complex emotion, and relationships are complicated too. You don’t have to figure this all out alone.
If you found this article about how to deal with resentment towards your partner helpful, you might like to check out these further resources:
- How To Resolve Resentment In Relationships: Tackling Shared Responsibilities
- Is It Normal To Resent Your Partner After Having A Baby?
- The Contented Relationship Guide, my short course all about how to go from resentment to contentment
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