Why Do People With Low Self-Esteem Have More Arguments With Their Partners?

Do you argue a lot with your partner? If so, chances are high that you (or your partner or both) have low self-esteem.

There are several reasons as to why people with low self-esteem find themselves involved in more arguments with their partners compared to people with high self-esteem. First of all, people attract others who view them in the same way as they view themselves. This means that people with low self-esteem attract people who consider them equally negatively as they do themselves. As sad as it may sound, this means that people with low self-esteem will never be loved to the same extent as people with high self-esteem. A lack of love might be one of the reasons to why arguments pop up more often for people with low self-esteem.

People with low self-esteem view themselves in a very negative light, and they therefore assume that others think equally negatively about them. They assume that their partners don't really love them, and they anticipate problems to arise in the relationship. At the same time, people with low self-esteem are afraid of being left alone. They therefore have to do all they can to protect themselves against being dumped. In order to protect yourself from something you first have to find it. For this reason people with low self-esteem are constantly searching for problems. The more you look for something, the more you find it. People with low self-esteem are very good at finding problems with their relationships and they are therefore very good at finding something to argue about.

Although people with low self-esteem are constantly searching for problems, they are actually not very good at coping with them once they arise. When a problem in the relationship arises, a person with high self-esteem would attribute the cause to specific, external and unstable causes. If his girlfriend doesn't come home at the time she said she would, he might for example assume that she got stuck in a traffic jam. In other words, the cause of her delay is specific to this occasion (she's not a late person in general), external because it was a traffic jam (rather than something inside him or her that they could have controlled) and unstable because the traffic jam was temporary and there will not be a traffic jam every day. Instead, a person with low self-esteem will attribute the causes of problems to global, internal and stable reasons, such as she will always come home late because she doesn't love me beacuse I'm such a lousy person. In this way, people with low self-esteem read too much into relatively small problems. They perceive even small issues as threats.

In order to make the prospect of being dumped less frightening, people with low self-esteem try to find faults in their partners. Being dumped by a person with lots of bad qualities is less frightening than being dumped by a person who is flawless. People with low self-esteem are therefore experts at finding flaws in their partners. This creates lots of opportunities for arguments. Nobody wants to have his or her faults being pointed out ever so often, and everyone would probably get angry if their partners were constantly complaining about them.

By now, you might have understood that low self-esteem is not very good for creating happy relationships. If you really want to have a lasting and fulfilling relationship, the best you can do is to raise your self-esteem.

If you want to know HOW you can raise your self-esteem, visit www.livmiyagawa.com!

Liv Miyagawa – The Self-Esteem Coach