At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not?
The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc.
High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.