Most of us like to believe that we know everything there is to know about our partners. Part of feeling connected to someone is believing you understand them completely.
However, it can be easy to overlook the blind spots we have in our knowledge of other people.
Here are a few signs that you don’t actually know your partner as well as you think you do.
You've never met their friends.
Our friends are usually some of our favorite people. We choose them based on common interests, compatible personalities, and how much fun we have in their company.
When your partner doesn’t introduce you to the important people in their life, it’s hard to know what they’re like outside of your relationship.
"If your partner doesn't introduce you to friends or family — and it's been six to 12 months or more of dating, they’re manipulating your perception of them,” relationship expert April Masini told INSIDER.
It’s important to know what kind of person your partner is outside of the bubble of your couplehood. Beyond just hearing those embarrassing stories from their high school years, meeting your partner’s friends can reveal a lot about their tendencies and sense of humor.
They have a lot of hobbies and interests that don't include you.
It’s healthy for two people in a relationship to maintain their own individual hobbies and pastimes after coupling up. After all, some of your partner’s unique interests and passions probably attracted you to them in the first place.
But when your partner seems to have a second social or creative life that is entirely separate from the one you share together, that could mean you’re not as connected as you think you are.
Research has shown that couples who spend more time together are happier. If your partner’s free time is filled with activities that you never seem to include you, it’s worth talking to them about how you can find more common ground.
They don't talk about their upbringing.
If your partner doesn’t ever talk about their childhood, it could be a sign that there are things about their upbringing that they’d rather you not know.
“Being hesitant or unwilling to discuss one’s childhood almost always suggests that it was either chaotic or suffused with feelings of inadequacy and shame,” clinical psychologist Leon F. Seltzer wrote in Psychology Today.
Allowing your partner to talk about their experience growing up when they’re ready could bring the two of you closer. Until then, don’t make assumptions about their childhood until you know all the facts.
You've never faced a major crisis together.
It’s easy to be our best selves when everything is going right. However, people’s true colors tend to show when a major catastrophe strikes.
If you’ve never seen your partner handle a tough situation like a family emergency, health problem, or even a flat tire, you don’t know how they perform under pressure. Knowing how your beloved handles themselves on a sunny Sunday afternoon is one thing, but trusting that they can keep their cool in an emergency is quite another.
You never disagree.
No two people are exactly alike, which means that all couples are bound to disagree on something eventually. Never coming into conflict with your partner could mean that one of you isn’t speaking up when a sensitive issue arises.
“The biggest mistake that couples make is avoidance. We feel something but say nothing. At least until we can’t stand it anymore,” relationship writer Joseph Granny told The Guardian.
Of course, there’s a difference between a calm, constructive disagreement and having an all-out brawl. Constantly being at each other’s throats isn’t a marker of a good relationship.
“In healthy relationships, growth is very important, generally in the same direction, so you need to be able to have arguments, and conflicts and points of disagreements without killing each other,” psychologist Perpetua Neo told The Independent.
You don't know how they spend their money.
No one expects you to sign up for a joint bank account after a few dinner dates. However, not knowing how your partner spends their paycheck could mean you don’t actually know very much about their relationship with money. And that can spell trouble down the line.
As the author of the book “Money and Marriage” Matt Bell told Forbes, it’s important to know your partner’s views on spending and saving.
“A lot of the fights between spouses that seem as though they’re about money aren’t about [money] at all. It’s actually a clash of temperaments,” said Bell.
If you don’t know anything about your partner’s day-to-day spending or what their financial goals are, you could be in for a shock if your finances ever merge.
You don't know their specific plans for the future.
Maybe you two have plans to go on vacation and have talked about moving in together someday. But do you know about their long-term plans and goals for the future?
There are plenty of ways your partner’s vision for the future might differ from yours, including plans for further schooling, their willingness to relocate for career reasons, and their timeline for settling down.
Knowing that your partner wants to have children or start their own business “someday” is a start, but until you know whether that “someday” means next year or next decade, you don’t have all the information you need to make the decisions you need to about the future.
You never talk about big issues.
If you know how much milk your sweetheart likes in their cereal but not how they feel about topics like infidelity, abortion, and immigration, you might have a problem.
Karl Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell University, interviewed a number of older Americans for his book “30 Lessons for Loving.”
One interviewee outlined the importance of shared values: “if you have divergent personalities and ideas of what’s right and wrong, and what you want to do and what you don’t want to do right at the very beginning, well, it’s not going to get better. It’s going to go downhill.”
They don't pick up on your emotional cues.
If you’ve had a bad day at work and throw yourself on the sofa next to your partner, you might reasonably expect them to pick up on the fact that you’re exhausted and upset.
If they don’t, it could be because you don’t understand the kind of communication your partner needs.
"Your partner may love you but may not understand the extent to which you feel and think about the issue in question,” relationship counselor and clinical sexologist Dr. Martha Tara Lee of Eros Coaching, told Bustle.
You think your partner is perfect.
No one is wonderful 24/7. We all our nasty moments and embarrassing quirks.
People in the first throes of love have a tendency to gloss over their sweetheart’s foibles or turn a blind eye to their annoying habits. But sooner or later, we all have to face the reality that no one is perfect, even the people we love the most.
If you still think that your partner is somehow immune to normal human weakness and can do no wrong, you probably just don’t know them as well as you think.
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