There are times someone in a relationship will find they are having themselves a seemingly wonderful day and they greet their partner only to find a budding sense of anger.

This is an all too common phenomenon. But why? This is your partner, the one you chose to spend every day with. You try to search endlessly for a reason why you’re mad and come up empty-handed. Well, let’s talk about needs. Physical needs, sexual needs, emotional needs.

Let’s start with emotional. Say you come home from a long day at work and someone talked terribly to you, you wanted to express this to your partner but they were just staring at their phone. You walk away and don’t even correlate that the anger you feel is from not being acknowledged. Just like a kid would feel if they were sitting in the back seat of a car screaming your name to ask you to look at the silly face that you were making but you couldn’t because you were driving. Now it doesn’t matter why your partner wasn’t doing it, it was the inability to acknowledge that brought pain, and that created stories about how he is as a partner to you. In reality like the kid in the car people cannot meet our needs at all times. If you were to turn around while driving, you could get in a serious accident or potentially be killed. Now, that does not mean your partner is off the hook for the un acknowledgment. You come back later to address this, he may give his perspective, and you come up with a resolution. This may be setting a specific time to talk about the day with each other. This is meeting your need. When other people aren’t available,  this improves the relationship immensely.