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The Toxicity of Scorekeeping
If you have been in a relationship with an emotionally immature person or a narcissist, then you may know about scorekeeping. This is one of the most toxic behaviors and it will kill a relationship. If you are an emotionally mature person, and unsuspectingly live with one of these toxic personalities, you may be overlooking the scorekeeping. It happens because they create such devastating chaos in your life, that the scorekeeping kind of flies under the radar. I remember many years ago thinking about how annoying my husband was with the scorekeeping. But, when I would point out that behavior and how it undermines our relationship, he would deny it. Always operating under plausible deniability.
When one person in a relationship is constantly keeping score, ultimately the other will also have to participate in it too. Even if they don’t want to, if one is doing it, the other is forced to. If the scorekeeper does the dishes once, then they wait some unknown amount of time before doing them again. In my marriage, there was some equation to it that I never figured out. He does the dishes at a 1:25 ratio, or something like this. I couldn’t really know. And he would never actually do all the dishes, only some and leave others to “soak”, which meant I got the heavy pans the next day. The problem is that you never really know the score unless you become a scorekeeper too.
