All articles I found about this question actually missed the point. So I decided to straighten it out. This all boils down to one fundamental factor that you should zoom in on if you want to have better communication in your relationship.
Out of the many reasons why communication is so hard in a relationship, the most important, underlying reason is that there are special demands for emotional content between partners and that is difficult to handle for many people. Potentially including either you, your partner, or both.
In this article, I will show you a very doable way to start dealing with your communication. You will get everything you need, so stay tuned. But first, let’s take a closer look at what is so special about communication in a relationship.
What is so special about it?
In a relationship, you have a need to feel loved and appreciated – whether you realize it or not. To some extent at least.
You must feel closeness, security, and trust. You must experience and feel that you receive attention, support, and backing from your partner. We all need that, but what it takes to get and maintain that feeling is individual. Very individual. This means that what you need, is most likely different from your partner’s needs.
Let me remind you that if one of you needs something, you both need to deal with that thing in some way. After all, you form a partnership, remember. You are together in this as partners. As one unity.
Now, what is different is that these factors are far less important in most other forms of communication. With most friends and acquaintances, your boss, colleagues, employees, fellow students, customers, suppliers, business partners, professional networks, public authorities, your neighbor, etc., these factors do not matter nearly as much as in your romantic relationship.
Admittedly – but a little out of context – it should perhaps be mentioned that there are other conversations where the emotional content can also be important and especially perhaps based on the motto the more the better. That can be between children and parents. Maybe with siblings or very close friends, depending on your relationship. And professionals within e.g. child care, adult care, therapy, and others, can also benefit from being able to handle emotional content on a significant level.
Specific reasons
In this section, we will touch on a large number of different specific reasons why communication is so difficult in a relationship. You may find something that resonates here. However, as you will see, the real, more fundamental background for all of them is that the emotional connection between the partners is not handled well enough in the communication.
Warning: I will be shooting out examples to the east and to the west here. No order or structure. If anything I hope your takeaway will be that there are no easy answers to why communication in a relationship may be malfunctioning.
It takes two
First, I would like to touch on the fact that it takes two to communicate. If one party wants to communicate or talk, but the other party doesn’t really do it, then an imbalance occurs. There may be different needs to be able to speak about experiences or reflections or to describe attitudes to proposals or issues in words.
There can also be differences in how much one needs to communicate in a purely physical way via body language. Emotional expression via voice, mimicry, or gesticulation may be more important for one of you than for the other. In that case, one party may experience conversations as insensitive and without an emotional connection.
Correspondingly, one partner uses mimicry, voice, and gesticulation to express his feelings. If the other person is not particularly good at reading non-verbal messages, it could mean that the sender does not feel understood and heard. With good reason, by the way, since this can be compared to speaking two different languages.
Lack of openness
Another factor that is important to mention is if you find it difficult to communicate in your relationship because your partner does not participate in the communication in a sufficiently open way. By open I mean to be open about what emotions you have about the matter.
Let me make it clear that I am not going to suggest that any of you start looking back at your childhood to understand your own or each other’s issues. If you will or not is up to you to decide. The following is only to mention that the reasons can be many.
The reluctance to talk about feelings can come from many different reasons. Emotional openness is something many of us do not have with us from our childhood homes and therefore many adults find it difficult to talk about what they feel. It may be because of a childhood home or a school that did not sufficiently embrace the ability to show emotions. Maybe you got scolded by your mom or dad if you cried to show sadness, upsetness, or scare. Or that you were rejected and were allowed to sit alone in the pram when you cried. Or it could be because if you said you were upset “that Tom had taken the shovel in the sandbox”, you would get the answer: “It’s nothing to cry about – just take it back!” Another example is the child who gives a love letter to his beloved, after which the latter displays the feelings to the whole class and ridicules the emotional expression. A natural consequence may be that the child chooses not to express these kinds of feelings in the future and perhaps even creates some level of anxiety associated with having to express emotions.
Expectations
But just as the cause can be found in the person who does not communicate, the lack of communication can also stem from the partner. It may be that your way of communicating actually slows down or prevents your partner’s communication. This can, for example, be by signaling your expectations to your partner.
Perhaps an expectation that something must be done or something must take place in a certain way. Maybe your partner can feel that there is no free choice for him or her, or that your partner can imagine being forced to choose between either having to reject and disappoint you or having to destroy something for himself. It could, for example, be limiting one’s integrity, one’s freedom, one’s training plans, or having to work even harder. Perhaps looking forward to an uncomfortable conflict on top.
One of the partners may have in fact – indirectly – expressed an expectation that a specific answer to a question will be given. In doing so, principles of honesty will perhaps be disregarded and, as a consequence, openness will obviously have difficult times in communication. It can be difficult to recognize that our own attitude to some issues is not shared by our partner. We may feel the urge to persuade or otherwise put pressure on our partner to think the same as ourselves. But if we do that, we create an obstacle for us to having good communication in the relationship.
If you believe that your partner communicates poorly, the real reason may possibly be that you yourself have created an adversarial relationship between you and thus it may in fact be yourself who is the source of the poor or lack of communication. I know, it may be a scary thought but remember it may also be not at all the case.
The fact that one of you is quiet and does not say much and the other is very talkative and has a great need for communication does not mean that the quiet one is bad at communicating. The most common is that the background for unsatisfactory communication must be found in contributions from both parties.
In summary
It may be controversial, but I would submit that all of the examples that I have mentioned above in this article – and many, many more that I have not included – are all basically about a single, underlying theme. By working on understanding and being able to deal with this, the vast majority of problems will find a solution – and it is not as difficult as you may think by now!
My experience is that talking about, listening to, and acknowledging each other’s feelings is fundamentally important to establishing openness, honesty, confidence, and trust between partners in a romantic relationship. Some of us can do this to an extent that matches our partner, while other couples have a built-in mismatch that requires the development of both competencies and skills in communication. Within one or both of the partners.
Next step
Now we have to talk about how communication in the relationship can be improved in the easiest way.
I am aware that the range of examples I have mentioned above is only a small selection of the factors that may be at play. It is even likely that the challenges you have are completely different than those examples. I am also aware that the examples here may already appear to be many and a large and unmanageable mouthful to learn to understand.
It can be difficult to learn how to first identify and then strengthen and improve the individual parts that need improvement in communication. Issue by issue. However, my experience is that if you only learn to talk about feelings in an open, honest, and respectful way, you will be able to bring a high degree of openness, confidence, and trust into the communication and this will benefit the development of the entire relationship.
The most accessible and easiest way to learn to communicate about feelings is to follow a clear and simple guide on how to do it. I suggest that you – as a couple – learn a relatively simple technique for having conversations that I have at hand to have better conversations.
In short, the technique is that one of you talks about a certain topic you are facing, that has an emotional perspective, and that you would like your partner to be involved in. Your partner then follows a few, specific steps to listen actively, and ask questions to establish close contact.
During this process, you will both address the former partner’s feelings. The way it is done is direct, specific, and fully accepts and acknowledges your partner’s feelings as relevant and with their right to exist without being challenged.
Like a slow form of magic, this will subsequently build confidence, which is a foundation for trust and a closer relationship.
The technique is called a structured conversation and you can find much more about it in other articles here at FIMAB.
Pete