Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Top 3 Tips to Fix The Communication In Your Marriage
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Ever found yourself wondering why your spouse doesn't just "get it" without you having to say anything? You're not alone. Marriage communication breaks down in predictable patterns, but understanding these patterns is your first step toward meaningful change.
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How do you improve communication in your marriage? Here's the deal about this question, and I understand that a lot of people are looking to the answer for it, but the question isn't exactly right. Not that it's wrong, it's a good question. But there's so many different ways that this question could be answered that I think it's appropriate to address it in a couple of different types of circumstances, communication is very vague across the board. So when you're asking the question of how do I improve communication in my marriage, my question back to you is gonna be what kind of communication Are you wanting to improve? The positive, lighthearted, friendship type of communication in your marriage where you're just able to talk and have fun and laugh? Or are you looking to improve the communication where you're in the middle of disagreeing about something and you feel like your spouse just isn't listening to you? Or maybe you aren't actively fighting, but you have certain expectations that you have thought of and are keeping in your mind that you're hoping that your spouse will live up to, but you haven't exactly communicated what those are. For this video, I'll be using those three categories to give the answer of how you can improve communication in your marriage, and even then, I'm still sure that there are other facets of communication that could still work to be improved upon, but overall, those are the three that we're going to address in today's video. So the first one is how do I improve communication with my spouse? Because we're just not talking anymore. This is a great question, and if you're wanting to improve communication, let's go back to the basic definition of communication.
Speaker 1:Communication is a person who is sending a message that the other person receives and then gives feedback back that they have received it. At its basic core, that is what communication is. But when we're looking at a marriage, when we're looking at two people who love each other and are supposed to love each other until death, do us part. Communication needs to not just be a bunch of back and forth of facts, because that's where it starts to feel like a job and that's where you can start to feel like you don't want to be a part of it, like it's getting mundane, it's getting monotonous and you want to do something else to spice it up. So let's start looking at communication as a modicum in which you can spice up your marriage.
Speaker 1:Think back to when you and your spouse were dating. You communicated, you talked about things that you had shared interest about, about things that both of you found important to each other. You talked about the day, the news, your dreams, your future, your past, your hurts, stories from your past. Those were likely things that you engaged in and talked about all the time, and it's a type of communication. It's the type of communication that builds friendship, and friendship is the basis of intimacy, and intimacy is one of the three areas of love, and when we look at the research of what love is, according to Dr Sternberg, we see that love is comprised of intimacy, passion and commitment.
Speaker 1:Intimacy is the communication where you're best friends with each other. Alternatively, but in line with in the intimacy part of communication, talking about things you both enjoy, connecting with each other on shared hobbies and things like that is also part of how we are attracted to another person through what we call intellectual attraction, which is one of the four types of ways that we are attracted to other people. The four are physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. So with intellectual attraction, it's sharing a set of hobbies together, or even if you don't share the same initial enjoyment in those hobbies, it is showing interest in the hobbies that your spouse has and them showing interest in yours, which gives you more things to talk about. So if you want to improve your communication overall, then it's great to start with the communication that allows you to be best friends, sharing about what's going on, what you're struggling with, where you need help, where you need support, where you need encouragement. That allows you to be best friends.
Speaker 1:In fact, in the fitness world, which is something that I am personally passionate about I love working out, I love focusing on fitness and health and all of those things there's something that we know when it comes to fitness levels, especially specifically like cardiovascular fitness, if you think of it like a pyramid and stay with me, it's going to come back to communication If you think of physical fitness like a pyramid, then you need a really strong base foundation in order to build your max capacity on top of so, a lot of times, this is used in cardiovascular training to state that you don't need to be running full out sprint efforts every day. You actually need to have a really strong base of being able to run at a conversational pace the majority of the time, and that allows you the ability to have a stronger or a higher pinnacle of being able to run all out sprints at a faster pace. How does that all connect with this that we're talking about? If you want to be able to handle the hard stuff together, if you want to be able to have difficult conversations and disagree or have conflict but still love each other afterward, then it's important to have the strong foundation of intimacy, of friendship, of seeing each other as each other's best friend, because that builds the trust that allows you to have more difficult conversations in the future. So then, what's the next bucket we want to cover? Let's cover the bucket of unmet expectations, which was the third thing that I mentioned, but we're going to move it to the second thing we talked about.
Speaker 1:A lot of times we suffer in our communication because we have an expectation of our spouse that our spouse doesn't know about. There was a couple that I worked with several years ago and the wife said to me I just want to feel like my husband appreciates me. I want him to show me through random acts of kindness that he loves me. Now, she never really told him that was her expectation and, even worse, when he did try to do that in his way, by scheduling sending her flowers and putting it in his calendar to remind himself, to take her on date nights or to write her love notes. She got pissed at him because he wasn't doing it spontaneously. So not only were her expectations uncommunicated, but also her expectations were unrealistic and a bit controlling, if we're going to be honest, because she was expecting her husband to do everything the way she wanted him to do it. This suffocates love. If you try and force your spouse to do all of the things you want him or her to do in the way that you want him or her to do it, it leads to control. It leads to divorce. I know that those are strong words, but unless this is rectified, it's going to push the other person away.
Speaker 1:So why don't we start with first asking yourself what are the expectations you have not communicated? And let me be clear it's okay to have those. It's okay for me to have an expectation that on Sunday afternoons, when my husband and I are getting ready for small group to come over to our house, that my husband is going to help me. It's okay for me to have that expectation. What's not okay is for me to never tell him that and then judge him, resent him or yell at him when he doesn't do what I wanted him to do, and especially with saying the phrase he should have known. He's not going to know, he's not a mind reader it is one that you communicate it clearly with love, what your expectations are. So something such as hey, rob, you know, today small group happens at four. When can we start cleaning? When can we do this together? How are we going to break up the tasks between the two of us? Opening it as a conversation, bringing him into the loop, instead of just assuming that he's going to help me and then stomp around angry when he doesn't Understand? Where are your expectations? And then, furthermore, where are they unrealistic? It would be unrealistic, perhaps, for me to think that my husband is going to have the drive to do it at 7 am on Sunday morning, even though that might be the time I want to get it done. It would be unrealistic to make all of those same assumptions for him. So, instead of making unrealistic assumptions or expectations, state your expectations with love. Expectations, state your expectations with love, have the conversation, compromise where needed, and that will help a lot of the resentment and disagreement that could come.
Speaker 1:For our third category, we're going to address what to do to better communicate in the middle of disagreeing. Similar to the last point, there's unmet expectations and unmet needs that likely come in to almost every disagreement. In fact, one of the things that we know from the research is that 60% of disagreements, 60% of the things that you and your spouse fight about, are never going to be resolved. Never. Aren't you glad you came here for some encouragement today? It is encouraging, and here's why Most of the reasons that those conflicts are never going to be resolved is because you are two different people with two different outlooks on life, two different upbringings and two different experiences, and so the things that you ultimately, would love to see happen in the way that you want to see them happen again, they're not always realistic, and the beauty of marriage and the beauty of great relationships is you're not always going to get everything you want.
Speaker 1:Why is that the beauty of great relationships? Because if I was in a relationship where I constantly just got what I wanted all of the time and didn't have to put any work into it, I wouldn't treasure it. I wouldn't treasure or respect the other person to see that sometimes, a lot of the time, probably most of the time their needs are more important than my own, even if I still feel like my needs are important, which they are. Everyone's needs are important. But when we bring in the mindset of how can I love unconditionally, how can I help my spouse meet their needs, it breeds a much better relationship. That's the kind of relationship everyone wants to be in.
Speaker 1:If you and your spouse both thought that way about each other, don't you know that communication would be better and conflict would be better. So it's actually kind of good news that 60% of the time you're not going to fully agree, but it gives you the opportunity 60% of the time, to show the other person you love them, by listening to them, by trying to understand where they're coming from and by compromising. And that's the key here. When you disagree about something, try and shift your mindset away from proving your point and getting your way into listening to understand. That's a very mature mindset to have and it's very difficult to do, especially at first. And it's not that it necessarily ever gets easy, it just gets a little easier to do. That it doesn't mean it's always easy to hold back and listen when you're really wanting to prove your point. But I promise you, if you take that approach, it will make a huge difference in the way that you and your spouse not just fight, but the outcome that you both can come to. And then the bonus point for this is that, even if your spouse ultimately don't agree about any of the things that you fight about, you don't have to.
Speaker 1:The key after fighting or after conflict is to be able to come back together and connect in an emotional way, in a positive emotional way, so it's being able to still hug, kiss, cuddle on the couch, have a conversation where both of you say to each other, even though we don't agree, I love you, I'm here for you and I'm not leaving you. So those are the three different ways in which we can improve our communication. First, focus on building a friendship by talking about things that build intimacy. The second one is to realize where your unmet and unrealistic expectations are and shift those to not have so many unmet or unrealistic expectations. Make your expectations realistic and communicate them. And then, thirdly, realize that disagreeing about something is actually an amazing opportunity to lean in, listen to your spouse and show them that you love them by trying to make a compromise on what to do next.
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