If you find yourself often thinking about whether or not your spouse is really the right person for you, as many married-with-children-types often do, I’ve got bad news: You’re already setting your marriage up for failure.

We tend to believe that our partners are either right for us, or completely wrong; our relationship is either “meant to be,” or it just isn’t; we’re with our soulmate, or we’ve totally “settled.”

This all-or-nothing model of relationships puts us in a Catch-22. We want to know whether we are with the right mate, but the very act of questioning whether he or she is either right or wrong sets us up to expect way too much from them. These crazy-high expectations lead us to believe that if we notice our partner’s flaws or incompatibilities with us, we must be in the “wrong” relationship. That evokes feelings of frustration, disappointment, and resentment—maybe even contempt, which is a real relationship-killer.

These negative feelings aren’t trivial. They are cancers to relationships.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Read this post from my Greater Good blog for four ways to release our unrealistic expectations and the toxic feelings they create in relationships.