Are You Making These Common Communication Mistakes In Your Marriage?
Are You Making These Common Communication Mistakes In Your Marriage?
Are You Making These Common Communication Mistakes In Your Marriage?
By Bradley Bennett
Communication is the force that drives everything else in your marriage. When it’s good, it pulls the other parts of your marriage up with it. But when it falters, everything else will begin to struggle too.
I know Amanda and I have felt this truth in our marriage.
When the communication is working, everything else seems easier. We feel closer, more connected, happier, and less frustrated. But when the communication begins to break down, we see frustration and all types of friction begin to surface.
Why does communication hold so much weight in our marriage? It’s due to the vital role it plays in helping our spouse feel loved.
The Role of Communication In Our Marriage
Each one of us has a desire to be fully understood. When someone takes the time to do this, we feel loved.
The opposite is also true. When we feel like we’re not understood, we feel unloved.
Communication’s role in our marriage is to help us meet that desire. Its quality determines whether our spouse feels understood and therefore, loved.
We believe that high-quality communication is an essential element in building an “Us” Marriage.
So what causes communication to break down?
I’ve found that when I’m not communicating well with Amanda, I can trace it back to a few common communication mistakes. When talking with others, I found they were experiencing the same thing!
These mistakes stem from bad habits most of us pick up along the way. Eliminating them from our marriage allows us to improve our communication and better understand each other.
Here are the common marriage communication mistakes I’ve spotted and some tips on how you can remove them:
Listening To Respond, Not Understand
Want to have better communication in your marriage overnight? Care less about what you have to say and more about understanding your spouse.
Healthy communication happens when one spouse is speaking and the other is focusing on actively listening to them. We break that foundation down when we are more concerned with airing our opinion than listening. From there, it devolves into both spouses simply talking at each other.
What tends to happen, at least in my life, is Amanda will be sharing something with me and I’ll focus on finding a solution rather than trying to understand how she feels.
Presenting a solution is not the ultimate point of our communication, though. She’s sharing because she wants to be understood by me. When I am more concerned with presenting a solution while she’s talking, I’m robbing her of that.
Instead, my goal is to first make sure she feels understood and therefore loved. Once that has happened I can begin talking through solutions.
As is says in Proverbs 18:2, “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”
Communicating Through Emotion
I rarely say anything loving or encouraging to Amanda when I’m angry, frustrated, or hurt. Most of the time I end up saying something damaging that I regret.
This is because our brains are not wired to have healthy communication while we’re experiencing emotions. We’re working against mother nature.
When we speak with our spouse 99% of the time we are using the logical part of our brain called the neocortex. We’re able to use judgment and self-control in what we are saying.
When we get angry or frustrated, though, our brain shuts off the neocortex and we act from the emotional side of our brain, the limbic system. With our judgment impaired by anger, it’s easy to see why we say things we normally wouldn’t.
This means that it’s not the time to have important or heated discussions. It’s impossible to act with grace and understanding when our brain is in this state.
Amanda and I have learned that if we start feeling this way that we need to take a break. We’ll cool off and then come back and talk from a more controlled, logical place.
When emotions get heated, take a moment and back off. Maybe you need to revisit this conversation later when you’ve both had a chance to cool off and aren’t hopped up on emotion.
Assuming You Know Everything
In life there are the things you know, the things you know you don’t know, and the things you don’t know you don’t know.
Not being aware of that last one can get us into a lot of trouble. Entering into a conversation assuming you know everything can blow back in your face.
Assuming this stance means that we are no longer trying to understand because we feel we know everything. We skip the listening part and jump straight into airing our opinions or responding to a situation.
Recently, Amanda and I had a little spat about the trash. She was frustrated that it wasn’t taken out the night before and had caused a little smell in the house. It wasn’t the best way to start the morning and she left for work a little peeved.
Later that day when she came back home from work she still seemed very frustrated. In my infinite wisdom, thinking I knew everything, I assumed she was still angry about the trash. It was the only reason I could think of.
This assumption made me get super defensive and be short with her.
What I found out later was that her kids at school had been off the chart crazy. All she wanted was to come home and relax. She was wanting to talk about her frustrating day but I was not giving her the chance.
By thinking I knew everything, I jumped to a conclusion that made it hard for her to communicate what was really going on with me.
Approaching our spouse with a humble attitude that says, “I don’t know everything,” allows us to be open to understanding what’s really going on. This strengthens the communication in the marriage.
Assuming Important Conversations Have Taken Place
Being married to someone means that there will be times when you need to have a tough conversation. These conversations can range from big picture decisions like, “what the future holds” to smaller conversations dealing with specific actions inside the marriage.
It’s so easy to believe that we have discussed something because we “dropped hints” about it. As if mentioning something once or twice in an offhanded comment is that same as sitting down and struggling through something together.
This is a dangerous game to play.
Assuming these conversations have happened can cause each spouse to walk in separate directions thinking the other one is beside them, only to realize at a crucial moment that they’re all alone!
When it comes to important decisions like the future of the marriage or job stuff, being intentional to have a sit-down conversation is important. Remember, communication is all about being fully understood. That can’t happen through passing comments or an offhanded mention every once in a while.
Full understanding and agreement can only happen face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, and knee-to-knee.
Air on the side of caution with important conversations. If there is any doubt whether or not you fully understand your partner or vice versa, then schedule a time to sit down.
Leave no room for ambiguity.
Commit To Communicating Well
Communication sets the level by which the rest of a marriage will rise or fall. Good communication will raise it, while bad communication will pull it down.
None of us are perfect and we’ll never communicate at 100%. Amanda and I still regularly see these mistakes pop up when we are communicating with each other. Despite this, I want to encourage you: don’t settle for things as they are now.
The current state of your marriage is not set in stone. No matter how good or bad the communication is in your marriage, we can always seek to grow. Commit to communicating well and removing these common communication mistakes.
The result? A marriage that’s being pulled up by healthy communication to a higher level of oneness and fulfillment