The Blame Game: Ask Your Partner to Show Their Work

As a couples therapist, I see a fair amount of blame.

Some of it justified. Some of it misplaced. And some of it arrives with such conviction that you’d think the case had already been tried and the verdict delivered.

When someone feels hurt, unloved, or treated unfairly by their partner, it’s understandable that they might hold their partner responsible.

After all, if your partner is the only other person in the relationship, who else are you going to blame?

Yes, yourself. I’m not blind.

But something interesting happens when one partner blames the other.

The person being blamed often becomes so concerned with defending themselves that they stop listening to what their partner is trying to tell them.

So, the person doing the blaming, feeling unheard, has to become more insistent.

Before long, neither is particularly interested in understanding the other. They’re busy trying to establish who’s right.

There’s another way to approach this.

Ask your partner to show their work.

Why Correcting Your Partner Rarely Works

Imagine your partner says:

“You never want to spend time with me.”

You immediately respond:

“That’s ridiculous. We spent the entire weekend together!”

And you may be absolutely right.

You spent Saturday shopping together, had dinner that evening, and went for a walk on Sunday. You’ve got the evidence. You can practically produce receipts.

But has your partner reconsidered their accusation?

Probably not.

They’re more likely to respond:

“That’s not what I mean. You never want to do anything with me. I always have to ask.”

Now you’re defending your enthusiasm for Saturday’s shopping trip.

What began as an expression of feeling unwanted has become an argument about whether you enjoyed buying groceries.

Your partner may have made an inaccurate accusation. But correcting it hasn’t necessarily helped either of you understand what’s wrong.

Two Plus Two Equals Five

Suppose I tell you that two plus two equals five.

You’d probably say, “No, it’s four.”

And I’d respond, “No, it’s five.”

You explain that two plus two is four.

I insist it’s five.

We can continue this for quite some time, although I suspect one of us will eventually have something better to do.

But suppose instead of telling me I’m wrong again, you ask me to show you how I arrived at five.

I hold up two fingers on one hand and begin counting two fingers on the other.

Except I’ve accidentally included a partially curled pinkie.

There’s your extra finger.

Now we can both see how I arrived at my answer.

You haven’t had to defeat my argument. You’ve helped me examine it.

And here’s something worth considering: what if, in asking me to show my work, you discover something you hadn’t understood about the problem yourself?

That’s where this becomes useful in relationships.

How Did You Get There?

Let’s return to:

“You never want to spend time with me.”

Instead of immediately defending yourself, you might ask:

“What makes you feel that way?”

Your partner says:

“Whenever I suggest doing something together, you seem reluctant. And when we finally do something, I feel like you’re just going along to keep me happy.”

Now you know considerably more.

The complaint isn’t necessarily about how many hours you spend together.

It’s about whether your partner feels wanted during those hours.

That’s a different problem.

You might explain that you enjoy spending time together but don’t particularly enjoy shopping. Or you might recognize that you’ve been distracted lately and haven’t initiated much.

You might also discover that your partner interprets your occasional desire to be alone as rejection.

Any of these possibilities gives you something more useful to discuss than whether the word never is mathematically accurate.

You can understand how your partner arrived at a conclusion without necessarily agreeing with it.

And sometimes, once they explain their reasoning, they may begin to question the conclusion themselves.

Being Blamed Can Hurt

There’s another reason this approach can be difficult.

Being unfairly blamed by someone you love can feel particularly hurtful.

This is someone who presumably knows you, cares about you, and thinks well of you.

So when they accuse you of being selfish, inconsiderate, or uncaring, the accusation can feel like more than a complaint about your behavior.

It can feel like a judgment of your character.

You really think I’m that kind of person?

Understandably, you want to correct that impression.

But the urgency to defend yourself can make it difficult to distinguish between what your partner is experiencing and what they’re concluding about you.

Your partner may genuinely feel neglected.

That doesn’t automatically mean you’ve been neglectful.

But neither does your disagreement mean their feeling is irrelevant.

There’s room to investigate both.

Showing Your Work Goes Both Ways

This isn’t a technique for getting your partner to recognize how wrong they are.

You have to be willing to show your work too.

Suppose your partner says:

“You’ve been critical of almost everything I’ve done lately.”

Your immediate reaction might be:

“That’s not true.”

But if they describe several occasions when you corrected them, dismissed a suggestion, or made a disparaging comment, you may have to reconsider.

Maybe you didn’t intend to be critical.

Maybe you didn’t even notice you were doing it.

But now you have something to look at.

And if your partner has misunderstood something, you have an opportunity to explain it without dismissing the experience that led to the misunderstanding.

The point isn’t to eliminate disagreement. It’s to make disagreement informative.

Both people should be able to explain how they arrived at their conclusions, question those conclusions, and change their minds when something new becomes apparent.

Sometimes Someone Really Is Wrong

Couples can become so concerned with avoiding blame that they lose sight of something fairly important.

Sometimes one partner really has behaved badly.

Sometimes a promise was broken, a boundary ignored, or a responsibility neglected.

Understanding why something happened doesn’t make it acceptable.

And understanding someone’s feelings doesn’t require agreeing with every conclusion they’ve drawn.

If you’ve done something wrong, acknowledging it matters.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I said I’d take care of that, and I didn’t.”

That shouldn’t require a three-day investigation.

Nor should the other partner have to present an airtight legal case before receiving an acknowledgment.

Accountability isn’t the enemy of understanding.

It’s often what understanding makes possible.

Don’t Keep a Tally Sheet

When couples don’t resolve these moments, they accumulate.

A small disappointment goes unacknowledged. An unfair accusation goes uncorrected. An apology never arrives.

The next disagreement brings some of the previous ones along for company.

Before long, couples are keeping track.

You did this.

Well, you did that.

And what about the time you…

It’s remarkable how much little shit two people can accumulate when neither feels that anything has been settled.

But when partners can acknowledge their mistakes, something changes.

I don’t have to hold on to every occasion when you’ve wronged me to make sure it isn’t forgotten.

And if I know you’re capable of acknowledging when you’re wrong, it becomes a little easier for me to acknowledge when I am.

Neither of us has to win every argument to feel secure in the relationship.

Make the Argument Worth Having

Conflict in relationships is inevitable.

Two people aren’t going to agree about everything, interpret everything the same way, or always behave as the other would prefer.

The goal isn’t to eliminate blame entirely, or pretend that responsibility doesn’t matter.

It’s to keep blame from becoming the end of the conversation.

When your partner makes an accusation, resist the temptation to immediately correct the verdict.

Ask how they arrived at it.

Listen to the reasoning.

Consider what you might have missed.

And when it’s your turn, be willing to show your work too.

Sometimes you’ll discover that your partner was mistaken.

Sometimes you’ll discover that you were.

And sometimes you’ll discover that you were arguing about two entirely different things.

At least now you’ll have something worth talking about.

Because the object isn’t to prove that two plus two equals four.

It’s to understand where the extra finger came from.