Your partner chews potato chips too aggressively. You feel annoyed. Should you bring it up?
You feel disappointed each time your partner checks their phone around you. Should you bring it up?
You feel angry that your partner failed to follow through on getting the information for your CPA to file your taxes on time. Should you bring it up?
If you’ve been in a relationship, you’ve encountered this question (probably thousands of times).
What's the right answer?
For some, the answer is to never bring anything up. When they feel pissed off, afraid, or even devastated, they jam it down into a sinkhole of unconscious emotion.
The benefit of this strategy is that it saves them from having to have a hard conversation. The cost is that it creates even bigger problems. They either withdraw or explode the moment that sinkhole of emotion begins to overflow.
Others do the opposite: they bring everything up. It's a strategy with serious defenders in the field of relationship psychology. They argue that full disclosure is the key to intimacy and connection.
So when it comes to your strange fantasies, dark thoughts, untamed emotions, and cruel judgments, the idea is to bring it all up. Withholding, on this view, is sometimes even considered a form of lying.
But this too is a trap. If you're the one bringing up everything, it's bad for your partner, as they become a walking repository for all of your unprocessed traumas, fear, anger, and disappointment.
But it's also bad for you because you never have to do the hard inner work of confronting your own issues. Instead, every problem turns into a relationship topic.
Neither strategy works. The first leads to repression. The second leads to emotional discharging and avoiding inner work.
What's the alternative?
We call it The 3:3:3 Rule. Ask these questions. If you get a "yes" to all three, it might be time to bring that issue up with your partner.
"Three thoughts. A level three issue. Three slow breaths. Get a yes on all three, and it's time to bring it up."
Did you have the thought 3 times?
How many times has that thought about your partner grabbed your attention? If it's just once, you probably don't need to bring it up.
If you found yourself distracted by the thought 3 or more times, it might make sense to share.
Is it a level 3 issue?
Imagine that your issues exist on a spectrum running from 1 to 5. A level 1 issue is pretty insignificant. Feeling annoyed, for example, by your partner's unorthodox toothbrushing technique is probably a level 1.
A level 5 issue, by contrast, is likely to rock the very foundation of your relationship. It's feeling betrayed, misled, or devastated.
If your issue lands somewhere around a level 3 or above, that's a good sign that you might want to bring it up.
Can you sit with it for 3 slow breaths?
Let's say you have the thought 3 times and you're dealing with a level 3 issue. Should you bring it up?
Not yet. We recommend one final step: see what happens when you sit with it for 3 slow breaths. This final step accomplishes two things.
First, it inserts a pause in action. It gives you a chance to regulate your response and avoid acting out on your default habits of reactivity and blame.
Second, it gives you a chance to be with your own discomfort before expressing the issue to your partner. After 3 breaths, you may still decide to bring it up. But you may also discover that the solution is more about doing your own work.
The 3:3:3 Rule isn't an exact formula. This is art, not science. But it should help you find that subtle middle ground between suppression and over-revealing, a space where you can discern what to bring up and what to work on yourself.