Our first child was a colicky baby, and my wife and I weren’t prepared for how the emotional ups and downs, the anxiety of not knowing what to do, and the dread of being alone with a baby put stress on our relationship. One of the ways that stress manifested in our life was in the idea of keeping score. Our son cried a lot in the middle of the night, and when we would shift-change during those times, we would easily fall victim to being resentful of the other—resentful if they didn’t try to soothe him for what we thought was a long enough time, resentful if they didn’t try to soothe him in a manner that we thought was best, and (believe it or not) resentful if they were able to get him back to sleep after we had been unsuccessful moments earlier.

People warn new parents about how they’ll always be tired, but being tired had nothing on the pressure all of this resentment put on our relationship. What is it about our desire to have fairness in a relationship or to spend time keeping score in order to show that things aren’t fair? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why have we imbibed the idea that an ideal relationship is meant to be fifty-fifty rather than each partner at 100 percent as our Church teaches?

It’s important to recognize that, at a basic level, this is just a part of our human nature. We have a seemingly ingrained sense of fairness and a desire to see that fairness play out in specific ways. We can see this in young children fighting with their siblings over who got the most fruit snacks. It’s a part of life that we have to experience and learn to work through. But when it comes to relationships, keeping score and becoming resentful over a perceived lack of fairness can be poisonous.

Being Resentful Is Not the Same as Getting Frustrated

All of us will experience times of frustration in our relationships. (This is true for all kinds of relationships, but I’m going to focus on romantic partnerships in this part of the book.) After all, we’re constantly learning how to give and accept love, and learning how to love another person as God loves them gives us daily opportunities to see where we’re lacking and where we need to improve.

When a partner leaves the toilet seat up or doesn’t take out the trash in time for the morning collection, we might get frustrated. Similarly, when we leave our clothes on the floor or accidentally throw away important paperwork or track mud in the house, our partner might get frustrated with us. That frustration can lead to arguments, and it’s a bad feeling for everyone involved. Again, we’re all trying our best to move forward and grow as individuals in relationships with the hopes of learning to let go of the small frustrations and focus on loving others unconditionally. But it ain’t easy.

Resentment, however, is on a whole different level. This idea of keeping score, a game we have all played in our relationships from time to time, can poison a relationship. When we’re always on the lookout for fairness and equality in the tasks around the house, for example, we can always find ways to feel we’re being cheated and then start to grow in resentment toward our partner.

Harboring resentment against someone is dangerous because it leads directly to a disconnect in our ability to have empathy for them. After all, if I see the relationship as my partner failing to shoulder what I deem is an equal responsibility in the family, why would I ever try to put myself in their shoes and try to feel what it’s like to be on their side of things? Once our ability to have empathy for our partner fades away, the warning lights start going off and something needs to be done quickly to refocus the relationship and get things back on track.

So What Do We Do?

Communication is key to healing from resentment in a relationship. It’s not hard, but it is something we have to actively work on, especially because the things that bother us might not bother the other person, or we might not hear what the other person is actually trying to communicate.

The things that bother us and what we think have to get done may not be the same things that bother our partner or that they feel have to get done. Our typical approach to solving this problem is to nag our partner in an effort to get them to comply with what we want them to do, which builds resentment at both ends. We feel we shouldn’t have to nag our partner just to get them to do something as obvious as picking up their clothes off the floor. They get frustrated at being nagged for something as unimportant as leaving some clothes laying around.

To fend off resentment, we have to communicate what things are important to us and why. We can’t expect our partner to read our mind. We have to tell them what things we value, what things we have grown to expect in relationships because of our past experiences, and we have to tell them why. It isn’t enough to say, “I can’t stand you leaving your clothes on the floor!” because if clothes on the floor doesn’t bother our partner, they’ll just think we’re weird for having a problem with it. We have to share the reason this bothers us as well.

This insight into our thinking will help foster a healthier dialogue. Our partner may respond, “I see where you’re coming from and I’ll try to be more conscious of this,” or they will share their viewpoint for why they don’t see it as an issue, and we can then seek some kind of compromise or at least understanding.

Another approach to avoiding or healing resentment is to do it yourself. I’m not suggesting you should do everything yourself but rather that you think about the small things that happen in your life that breed resentment (such as the clothes on the floor). Wouldn’t doing the things we want to have done rather than nagging and harboring resent- ments go a long way toward maintaining a peaceful relationship? Let’s face it, picking up a shirt and tossing it in the hamper ends the whole problem right there. You’ve just kept a five-second task from spilling into an argument that could last well into the night and potentially foster a lot of resentment.

Sometimes resentment builds in a relationship because we don’t hear what our partner is saying or we misunderstand what they mean to convey. Active listening is a skill often suggested in couples therapy to address this, and it really works. When in a conversation with active listening as a goal, we sit next to, rather than across from, our partner. Sitting next to our partner is a nonverbal way of showing that we’re in this together. Next, we hold hands, which can be hard when we’re engaged in a difficult conversation, but holding hands goes a long way toward cutting the tension and making us think twice before saying something hurtful.

The most important skills of active listening are listening, paraphrasing what we have heard, and being willing to listen when our partner corrects what we’ve heard. It takes effort to learn to listen to our partner instead of focusing on our thoughts or formulating our response, but it makes all the difference. We quietly listen to what they’re saying and then before responding with our own thoughts, we paraphrase what we’ve heard them say: “So what I hear you saying is . . .” Once we relay what we think we’ve heard back to them, we give our partner space to correct it with what they actually meant, just in case we misunderstood them.

Our interpretation of what our partner has said so often misses the mark on what they were actually trying to say. For example, our partner might say, “It really bothers me that you leave your clothes laying around on the floor.” We hear, “You are disgusting and dirty and not worthy of love.” Okay, that might sound like a bit much, but it’s not too far from the truth. We hear something critical about one small part of our life, one small thing we’ve done or didn’t do, and we extrapolate it to mean that our partner finds us to be an absolute failure.

Thankfully, this active listening technique can help us get closer to hearing what they actually mean:

“It really bothers me that you leave your clothes laying around on the floor.”

“So what I hear you saying is that I’m dirty and leave our house messy and you’re disappointed in me.”

“No, actually, I think you do a great job keeping the house picked up; it’s just this one little thing.”

Once we hear what our partner is actually trying to say, it’s typically just limited to a small issue that can be corrected rather easily, and it’s rarely as catastrophic as the thing we’ve made up in our head. But does this method always work?

Is There Healing and Relief Out There?

Active listening always works if . . .

Of course, there’s always an “if,” and in this circumstance, it always works if we’re willing to believe that what our partner is saying is true. That’s the hard part. We have become so sure of our assessment of conversations, what people are trying to say to us, what people think of us, that even when they straight-up tell us what they mean, we don’t believe them!

Our mind tilts toward the negative, and that’s where resentment forms. If we want healing and relief from our resentments in our relationships, we have to assume good intentions. We have to ditch the desire to interpret what we read between the lines and believe them.

Sharing how we’re feeling, not expecting our partner to read our mind, taking responsibility for tasks that are priorities for us (just do it!), sitting next to each other and holding hands, and believing that we are worthy of love and that our partner believes that too—these are the keys toward finding healing and relief from the resentments that plague our mind and tear apart our relationships.

Couples therapy is a fantastic aid in learning how to use these coping skills, especially active listening. Being able to practice active listening with a therapist allows us to learn the skills in a safe environment, and the therapist can provide a valuable outside perspective on the relationship and the way it has been functioning. According to the psychologist Dianne Grande, couples therapy has been found to be “roughly 75 percent effective,” which is true across cultures and for “high-stress clients such as military couples, veterans with PTSD, parents of chronically ill children, and infertile couples.”¹

What the Bible Says about Resentment

All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. [And] be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

—Ephesians 4:31–32

Throughout scripture, we are reminded that harboring resentments, focusing on things that make us upset, and refusing to forgive or give someone the benefit of the doubt is a recipe for disaster in our walk with Christ. There is no room for repaying small inconveniences with resentment, anger, or even thoughts of frustration toward our partner.

Of course, it’s much easier said than done. How do we fight against our selfish and fallen human nature? How do we make the decision to live at peace with everyone and overlook an offense when our minds are telling us to get upset, stand up for fairness and equality in our relationships, and be resentful?

I’m reminded of the words of Christ in Matthew 19:26: “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible”; and then again his words from Matthew 11:28–30: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

There is real power and freedom to be found in placing everything on Christ, giving him every resentment we hold in our hearts and saying, “Here you go, help!” He can help, he can give us the strength to live in peace with everyone, and he wants us to cast our burdens on him. This isn’t just the classic “Offer it up” we heard so often growing up in the Catholic Church, but rather “Trust him to help you.” He will not abandon us to our anger, he will not turn a blind eye to our suffering, and he will not ignore our true desire to be free from resentment. He wants to show us the way, if only we ask and commit to following his lead. It is only through him that we can truly release the power resentment has over our relationships.

What the Saints Say about Resentment

Let me, my Jesus, share in your suffering, at least one of your thorns.

—St. Rita of Cascia

St. Augustine really drives home the destructive power of resentment: “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.” The resentments we hold, either in the silence of our hearts or that we say out loud in moments of frustration, have the potential to rot our relationships from the inside out. When we recognize what we’re doing to ourselves and our partner, we have to be willing to fight back against our inclinations toward resentment, root it out, and join our partner in moving the relationship to a healthier and more peaceful place.

It can give us pause when we look to the lives of various saints who clung to our Lord, avoided resentments even in the direst circum- stances, and overcame every sinful inclination to push through life in inspiring ways.

One such holy hero is St. Rita of Cascia. Rita was born in 1381 in Italy. Her parents were noble and yet known to be charitable. Despite her early requests to be admitted to a local convent, her parents arranged a marriage for her at the age of twelve. While arranged marriages at this age were somewhat common at the time, her experience was not a happy one. Her husband was physically and verbally abusive, and he had affairs for many years.

No one would have judged her for harboring resentments given all the abuse and difficulty she had to face at the hands of her husband, and yet she persevered in her holiness and humility in spite of it all. When her husband was murdered eighteen years into their marriage, Rita forgave his murderers and prayed that their twin sons, who wanted to avenge their father’s death, would also forgive them, which they did before their own early deaths. Free from her husband, Rita was finally able to join the convent, and she spent the last forty years of her life in the Augustinian convent at Cascia. Fifteen years before her death,“she received a stigmata-like thorn wound in answer to her prayers to be more profoundly conformed to the passion of the Lord Jesus. Rita was bedridden for the last four years of her life, consuming almost nothing except for the Eucharist. She died of tuberculosis at the age of seventy on May 22, 1456.”²

St. Rita is an incredible example of someone who turned her difficulties into opportunities, always thinking of ways to turn toward Christ for help rather than falling into a cycle of resentment even in these most difficult of circumstances. She’s also an example of someone who, when her circumstances changed, used the opportunity to chase her dream rather than remain mired in resentment over not being able to live out that dream sooner. She used her strength through Christ to overcome any selfishness or resentments.

St. Rita is ready to intercede for all of us who find ourselves tempted- ed to resentment in our own relationships. It’s worth it to reach out to her, someone who knows what it’s like to experience precisely these kinds of struggles, and ask her to implore Jesus to give us his grace, his peace, and his life.

In Brief

• Keeping score, a game we have all played in our relationships from time to time, is one of the most concerning things to come up in a
• Resentment and harboring thoughts of resentment toward our partner leads directly to a disconnect in our ability to have empathy for
• We have to communicate what is important to us and why. The time for holding resentment toward our partner because they don’t do something we want them to do, even though we’ve never told them it bothers us, has to
• Active listening involves listening, paraphrasing what we have heard, and being willing to listen when our partner corrects what we’ve It takes effort to learn to listen to our partner instead of focusing on our thoughts or formulating a response in haste, but it makes all the difference.
• Couples therapy is a fantastic aid in learning how to use these coping skills, especially active

Closing Prayer

When you stand to pray, forgive anyone against whom you have a grievance, so that your heavenly Father may in turn forgive you your transgressions.

—Mark 11:25

This excerpt from St. Dymphna’s Playbook: A Catholic Guide to Mental and Emotional Well-Being is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.