The Law of 80/20 in Relationships

The Pareto principle also known as the rule or law of 80/20 states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is a widely known and accepted rule of business but what most people don’t realize is the law can be applied to almost every aspect of life, including relationships.

If you’ve read books like The 5 Love Languages you may have realized at this point that everyone has a different way of showing appreciation and love for their partner in ways that make sense to them.

Simply put, this means two people could be expressing love for each other in different ways but neither of them realizing that their partners way of expressing their love and appreciation is different from their own, thus they completely ignore or often overlook the things their partner does to express their love and appreciation.

If you show love by buying gifts, then naturally you’ll be shown love by receiving gifts. You can almost always identify your partners primary love language based on the things they do for you.

A typical miscommunication in love languages may look like this.

Man: “I work hard to take care of this family, so everyone is taken care of.”

Woman: “I sit home all day and raise the children, clean the house, and make you dinner.”

Both the Man and the Woman in this example usually indicate that the other person doesn’t help them out with the “important” things and each one thinks they do more than the other.

The woman may think staying home and raising the kids is more important than going to work, while the man may think going to work is more important than raising the kids. Each one fights to show how much they do for the other while not appreciating each others efforts.

The misunderstanding is because they both show and receive love in a different way.

Speaking the same language can help tremendously in understanding the wants and desires of your partner. Identifying how they wish to be loved and appreciated can be easy.

Whatever they complain about, focus on, or talk about the most in arguments and in conversation is more than likely the things that they appreciate the most. It may be something simple like doing the dishes, fixing something, buying a gift, going out on a dinner date, a vacation, or any number of other things.

You may find that the things you’re doing that you think show them how much you love and appreciate them, are only important to you, and have little effect on them.

Here is a list of what are considered to be the basic needs of men and women, this list is not all inclusive or specific, but you can tell right off the bat that the needs are somewhat different.

Women Needs

To Feel Loved
To Feel Safe
To Feel Seen
To Be Allowed to Be Nurturing
To Feel Sexually Desired
To Be Appreciated
To Feel Like She Can Count On You

Men’s Needs

Praise and Approval
Respect
A Sense of Sexual Access
Emotional Intimacy
Space
Physical Touch
Security

This brings us to the law of 80/20 where 20% of the causes make up 80% of the effects. If you identify a few things that your partner really appreciates or wants you to do, you may find that doing some of those things, even infrequently, has a greater payoff than everything else you’ve been doing up to this point.

The 20% of the things you can do for your partner may be simple things like randomly buying flowers or taking out the trash. They could literally be anything, the smaller the thing is to you, the greater the payoff might be for your partner.

The things that YOU think are important probably fall into the 80% of the things you do that only give you 20% of the effect.

It’s almost guaranteed in the example above, that although very important, working to make money, raising the kids, or running the household are probably some of the things you put 80% of your time into and only get 20% of the effect or even less when it comes to expressing your love and appreciation.

You may come to find that doing a simple act, one that takes very little time, can have your partner beaming with enthusiasm at your expression of love for them.

You may find that by following the rule of 80/20 that you can substantially improve both your communication and relationship.

You may find that some of the 80% things that you’ve been doing that you feel are important are completely unnecessary and a waste of time. If that turns out to be the case, then you can get rid of those things and focus on what matters.

A simple good morning, an I love you, a random gift, or some cuddle time may go a lot further than you think. But you won’t know what’s important to your partner until you start listening.