5 Critical Conversations Every Healthy Couple Should Have
5 Critical Conversations Every Healthy Couple Should Have
By Bradley Bennett
Open and intimate communication is a crucial ingredient of a healthy marriage. It’s the lifeblood that keeps your relationship alive and well. When it’s present things will flow better, but when it’s missing things will seem harder.
Having this type of healthy communication in your marriage requires you to go deeper than casual conversations about your day. You need to have conversations about the hard topics, too.
Having these conversations can be hard, though. The path of least resistance is often to avoid having specific conversations so that you don’t “rock the boat”. While this approach may be easier, it’s ultimately a recipe for an apathetic marriage.
The conversations that seem the hardest to have are usually the healthiest.
Here are 6 conversations that Amanda and I believe are critical for every healthy couple.
1. Money
The money conversations can often be a powder keg of emotion just ready to burst. It’s for this reason that many couples simply avoid it all together. They keep their finances separate or have one spouse handle everything.
While it may be difficult, it’s important that you learn to facilitate these types of conversations within your marriage. Coming together to agree on a goal for your finances and a budget you can both get behind is crucial for creating unity.
Amanda and I have shared a few of our habits that help us facilitate these financial conversations in our marriage. Coming into an agreement on our finances has been game-changing for our marriage on many levels.
If you are struggling with having these conversations, I can not recommend Financial Peace University by Dave Ramsey enough. This program helped Amanda and I get on the same page about our finances and begin building unity.
2. Intimacy And Sex
The intimacy within your marriage is something you should be constantly talking about. An ongoing, open conversation about how close you are both feeling to each other can help you navigate some pretty rough stretches.
The area of intimacy that can often be the hardest for couples to talk through is sex. Usually, this is because this area of our life that can come associated with some deep-seated emotional scars like shame.
Because of this, many couples enter into a cone of silence about their sex life.
Having this silence around the area of sex in your marriage can very easily turn what was meant to be a beautiful gift into a curse. A lack of communication in this area can end up causing a ton of pain.
A great starting point for a conversation about sex is the frequency you desire. Being open, real, and honest about this will help you get on the same page and set expectations appropriately.
Once you’ve had that conversation it’s important to talk through how each of you prefers to communicate about sex, share what you like and don’t like, and how you can get the most out of it!
3. Self Discovery
You are constantly changing. The experiences you had yesterday, last week, and over the past month have helped shape you into a different person than you were before them. The same is also true of your spouse.
Because of this, it’s important to take time understanding yourself and share that with your spouse.
This is critical because I can’t expect Amanda to understand me if I haven’t taken the time to understand myself, first.
You need to have the conversations where you open the hood, rediscover each other, and ask each other the important question – Why?
Amanda and I help to facilitate this conversation by having very specific questions we ask each other in order to help peel back the layers. These questions help us dive in and see what’s happening beneath the hood.
Having this conversation will help you continual rediscover each other through the entirety of your marriage. Without it, you may wake up one day and realize you’re living in the same house with a completely different person whom you don’t understand!
4. Family Of Origin
The family you grew up with has a huge influence on your life. They will impact how you view marriage, communication, conflict, and much more.
When Amanda and I got married we each brought with us the unique quirks and tendencies that we learned from our families. We would enter into a situation and handle it completely differently. This made no sense to me until we had a conversation about our family of origin.
Having this conversation means talking through the dynamics of your family growing up. You share your experience and try to pinpoint the positive, and potentially negative, tendencies that you picked up.
Doing this will help you understand each other better, allow you to set up appropriate boundaries to protect your marriage, and learn to create traditions of your own.
5. Healthy Conflict
Fighting and arguing in your marriage isn’t actually a predictor of divorce, but the way you fight is. Using dirty fighting tactics likes yelling, stonewalling, and avoidance can turn a simple argument into a full-on war.
This is why an ongoing conversation about how you both handle conflict is so important.
Amanda and I give each other permission to bring up any dirty fighting tactics we see in our marriage. If we are not fighting fairly or doing something that is causing unhealthy conflict, we understand that it needs to be addressed.
Having a communication tool that walks you through conflict can be a huge help here. These tools help you slow down the conversation so that you can understand the other person and work to create an “Us Solution”.
Desire Healthy Communication
The strength of your communication is the main driver within your marriage. Everything else will rise or fall to match the level and strength of your communication.
These 5 conversations are critical. Without them, you will be avoiding important parts of your marriage that can help you experience a more fulfilling relationship.
My hope is that you wouldn’t shy away from these conversations. But that you would be willing to talk with your spouse and begin facilitating the type of communication that can take your marriage to the next level.