The Importance of Conversations in Relationships
Do you ever wonder what the key to a healthy, happy, relationship is?
The key is your conversations with your partner. Oftentimes, we get stuck in talking about the same topics over and over with our partner and it creates a stagnancy, stuckness, or distant feeling in our relationships.
And what do we think is the worst conversation to get stuck on? The topic of your relationship. How healthy is it? How are the two of you feeling about your relationship?
Many couples feel stifled in discussing the quality or nature of their relationship and don’t know how to have a better marriage. This can feel frustrating and irritating, but what you might not know is that this conversation is never going to go away.
Because this conversation is the relationship.
Once you understand that each conversation you have with your partner either nurtures the relationship, flatlines it, or harms it, your relationship will transforms.
Instead of trying to avoid the conversation, you can learn to become aware, courageous and present so you can navigate the conversation as if you were navigating the most important journey of your life.
The relationship formula: conversation = relationship.
It wasn’t until I had just left my marriage and found myself deep in sadness, that I learned where we had gone wrong.
I was listening to a speaker talk about the never-ending conversation couples find ourselves in: the topic of the relationship.
What are we doing? Where are we going? Why aren’t we happy?
Meanwhile, your partner is thinking, “Why are we having this conversation again?”
Navigating conversations is a huge piece of the relationship puzzle and it’s what I talk about more in-depth in my upcoming book, Fierce Love: Creating a Love That Lasts – One Conversation at a Time.
The conversation around the quality of your relationship is necessary, yet we dread it because we don’t know how to be open and communicate well during it. We find ourselves wanting to avoid the conversation, talk about it another time, or “just get it over with” so we don’t have to revisit it for a while.
If conversation = relationship, then the way you approach, communicate, and work through this conversation is a direct reflection of the quality of your relationship.
When I realized this, I also realized something very important.
If the conversation is the relationship, then what happens when it stops?
What happens when the conversation in your relationship stops?
This is what happened in my marriage. We stopped being real with each other, we stopped communicating because every time we tried to discuss something tricky, it wrecked another weekend.
And because the conversation is the relationship, when our conversations ended, so did our marriage.
The more we suffocate our voice, the more strain our relationship is going to take on. We may think we are doing the relationship a favor by keeping silent, but silence is the deadly killer here.
In my marriage, the more we didn’t say, the more our relationship fell apart.
Sometimes, we believe everything will fall apart if we try to tackle a tough issue with our partner, so we avoid it altogether. Or, we start limiting ourselves in what we speak about, and too quickly every conversation starts to fall into the “we can’t talk about that or we’ll fight” bucket.
Eventually, you will realize that many of the conversations you are having make you feel small, constrained, frustrated, and disconnected. This is when you know it’s time to make a change and start having better conversations with your partner. If you continue to go on like this, you’ll start to fall into resentment, loneliness, and begin imagining (like many of my clients have) the best way to exit the relationship.
This does not have to be your story!
If you can wake your conversations up now before your relationship becomes completely silent, you can transform your partnership into a connected, supportive and loving one.
It’s the conversations that keep a relationship alive and awake, and learning how to have healthy conversations that guides your relationship in a healthier direction.
Change your conversation, change your marriage
The good news is, any single conversation can change the course of your relationship.
But it can’t be any old conversation, it has the be a fierce conversation. It has to be an intentional, heart-open, solution-oriented conversation that both people in the relationship show up for.
Typically, the usual conversations you’re having aren’t going to work.
A fierce conversation is one where both partners make a conscious choice to show up as their real and authentic selves, disclose what they really think and feel, and do their best to truly see and hear one another.
A conversation like this might send you running in the opposite direction, but it’s conversations like this that force you out of your frustrating cycles and into growth and opportunity.
If you want to change your relationship, you must change your conversations.
The first step in this is to stop having a conversation “at” your partner and shift to having a conversation “with” your partner. If you and your spouse can see the problem objectively, lay it out on the table, and attack it from the same side, you’re well on your way to changing the outcomes of your conversations.
It’s important to not dance around your issues and instead choose to dive deep into the heart of the issue, together.
I promise you’ll both come out transformed for the better.
When you upgrade your current conversations to fierce conversations, you’ll find the love and motivation to keep pursuing the truth of your relationship. This will lead to the blossoming of a new, happier, healthier relationship full of life, love, and freedom.
And this choice… is entirely up to you.
Choosing courage, one conversation at a time
To have a healthy, fierce, and full of love relationship, we simply have to choose it.
This might sound easy, but oftentimes you’re up against a lot. Our preconceived opinions, rigidly held beliefs, or societal and family pressures to “not fail” no matter how unhappy you are, all weigh on us.
It’s important to remember that in just choosing to be different and show up differently, you’re choosing to be courageous, vulnerable and authentic.
And by choosing to be authentic, you’ll create a ripple effect that will positively affect your, your thoughts, your partner, and your relationship.
Although the stakes in love are high, the steps are small and the results are beautiful.
In my upcoming book, Fierce Love: Creating a Love That Lasts – One Conversation at a Time, I take you through all the small steps you can take to break through the myths around love that are holding you back from the relationship you want and walk you through the conversations to have with your partner that will transform your relationship into a thing of beauty.
A challenging relationship is not hopeless. It can be fixed.
If you’d like to learn more about how to have more meaningful conversations with your partner or how to have a better marriage through better communication, visit my website.
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