A relationship begins to decay as soon as one or both partners gets in the habit of personalizing blame.  The formal psychological term for this is “causal attribution.” In a nutshell, when something goes wrong, one person can assign blame to the other by attributing the problem to what they perceive as his or her weaknesses, flaws, or characteristic behavior. The accuser make things personal by beginning sentences with the word “you." Examples may include: “You never listen” "You always screw it up" “You’re always too busy” "You're never on time" "You never take my feelings into account" "This is so typical of you" It goes without saying that this type of attribution can be catastrophic. Personalizing blame can elicit defensive behavior from the other person that may potentially lead to a vicious cycle of blame. Once one person starts pointing the finger, the other tends to follow suit. And if neither is willing ...

Know why people judge others? For starters, they seem to forget that they themselves are not perfect. They don't like others to judge them unfairly, and yet that's precisely what they're doing. They live each day under the false premise that they are somehow "better" than others, which entitles them to pass judgment on people they may not even know that well. In the absence of information, they can only go by what they see. So if the person casting a critical eye notices another wearing, say, a "tacky" sweater, they might assume the person is poor or lacks any fashion sense. In the worst cases, they might go a step further and speculate that the person has a lousy love life. As I've noted before, some people try to compensate for their own perceived shortcomings by focusing on those they "detect" in others. In fact, they may even attribute their own flaws and weaknesses to other people -- a defense mechanism known as projection. I...