Reprinted with permission from Crazy for You: Breaking the Spell of Sex and Love Addiction by Kerry Cohen (Hachette Go, 2021), available from Amazon or Bookshop.
Uncomfortable Discussions
That said, arguments are a natural part of being in a relationship. In fact, you must be willing to argue for a relationship to work. You must be willing to be present for uncomfortable talks, which is a much better term for what we usually call arguments. The following are some golden rules for having uncomfortable relationship discussions:
- Respect, not communication. Pick your battles. Not everything is worth arguing about. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, performed an informal study of 1,500 happily married couples, asking them for relationship advice. The article on his website is worth reading in its entirety, but one of the more surprising and worthwhile results of the study was this: people who had been previously divorced thought that better communication would have saved the marriages, but the partners in marriages that lasted noted that the number one thing that kept them together was mutual respect. Imagine how the frequency, shape, and duration of your arguments would change with just this golden rule. Let’s consider Amy for this section so you can see that if even one person in the partnership changes their approach to arguments, so much can get better. She’s been relying on communication in an effort to get Tahir to change his behavior, which hasn’t worked, no matter how many times she’s tried to get him to understand. In many ways, communicating her needs over and over again leads her to feel worse because she has explicitly asked for something he won’t do. For Amy, it feels like evidence he doesn’t care. When she stepped back and observed what was happening for Tahir—he wasn’t intention‑ally making her feel alone; he was trying to feel safe because of a childhood wound—she began to see him in a new light. She had compassion for him, and she knew she was only making his wound feel worse. With this new respect for him as a whole person who deserved love and care, she knew she had to change her part in their dynamic.
- Arguments are almost always about your feelings and wounds, and not the content or thing in the physical world that started the argument. Every couple I’ve ever worked with starts by arguing about something in the physical world, like household chores, and within two or three conversation turns, they are arguing about their feelings about how they’re communicating. When you’re having an uncomfortable discussion, stop to check in with how you’re feeling. Chances are, an old wound was triggered by what your partner did, and that’s why you didn’t like it. And chances are, the fact that they’re defending themselves about it makes your wound feel even worse, because once again you feel unseen.
Amy gets frustrated with Tahir because he is always busy. He won’t sit still. When she says this to him, he gets defensive because it makes no sense that she’s angry with him for doing all the household chores. When Amy starts acknowledging the real reason she’s angry—he uses chores to avoid connection with her—she is able to express her feeling about that rather than the chores themselves. If she says, “I’m feeling sad because I miss you,” he will be much more likely to listen and respond with his own feelings.
- It’s okay, and sometimes better, to take a break. People process conflict differently. If you need to take a walk around the block or go to another room and do breathing exercises to calm down so you won’t screw up and do one of the bottom‑line no‑nos listed below, then do so. Decide together on an argument “safe” word or sentence or even hand signal that you can use so your partner knows you’re not just walking away from the discussion. Amy has a quick temper, and she knows it, so Tahir knows that she might say, “I need a break,” and walk away from the argument to cool down. After calming herself, she needs to reenter the conversation.
- Consider what you want before you open your mouth. More often than not, what you say and how you say it defies what you actually want in the moment. You may want to feel cared about, heard, or more connected to your partner, which is usually what Amy wants. Yet what she does is criticize Tahir, or she tells him he’s a bad partner who doesn’t care about her. Is it any wonder Amy feels like she’s been hitting her head against a wall trying to get what she wants? Amy has to learn to practice getting a wedge in between her true feelings and the words about to come out of her mouth. When she pauses and considers what she really wants, she can say, “I want to connect with you for a bit. Is now a good time?” Much better than “You’re a hurtful asshole who sucks at loving me,” yeah?
- For solutions, ask yourself “What do I need to do for you in order to get my need met?” In The New Rules of Marriage, Terrence Real asserts that rather than compromise, we need to consider what it will take to get our needs met in our relationships. More often than not, when we aren’t getting a need met, it’s because the need itself triggers our partner’s emotional wound. We wind up in a negative loop in which we communicate our need, our partner doesn’t meet it, and then we feel like our partner doesn’t care about our needs. In other words, simply communicating your need to your partner is unlikely to result in getting that need met. Real’s question forces us to slow down and take a look at our role in our dynamic with the other person. For a long time, Amy wasn’t giving Tahir the emotional space (one of his needs) to express his love, so why would he? By considering his needs, Amy has a much easier time getting what she needs.
- One person’s feelings at a time. This one takes practice, but I can’t stress enough the importance of making it a habit. Amy was regularly starting arguments or discussions with Tahir because she was unhappy with his behavior, and then he regularly got defensive or started explaining. Rather than respond with his feelings—for example, This again? Whatever I do, it’s never enough!—he needed to learn to give her feelings attention. This usually needs to start as a strategy. First, Amy had to learn to approach with a feeling rather than a criticism. Tahir knew they needed to use this new discussion model for the good of the relationship. They planned ahead of time that each person would get a set amount of time—in their case, ten minutes. The goal was to reach a resolution or solution for one person’s feelings before doing the same for the other person. They combined non‑violent communication with active listening to make sure they were hearing and understanding each other’s feelings. For example, Tahir could say, “So, you’re saying you feel alone right now.” Then he had to get her feedback about whether he had it right. If not, he had to ask her to say more so he could understand better. Then, they worked on a solution to her feeling. He said, “I’m not willing to spend all day with you because I often wind up feeling overwhelmed, but I am willing to spend about an hour with you today doing what would make you feel more connected to me.”
When they reached such a solution, they moved on to his feelings. “Okay, I want to talk about my feelings about this now. I feel like I often need the space and freedom that you won’t give me. Instead, you criticize me about whatever it is I’m doing that isn’t focusing on you.” And so on.
Obviously, whatever solutions they come to are not going to immediately and absolutely fix their relationship. Amy and Tahir still have a long way to go before both of them consistently take more responsibility for their respective wounds and projections. The goal is simply to make some sort of progress with this particular issue. Or if they can’t make progress, that they agree to table it for now and come back to it, perhaps with a therapist to help.
Something useful about this discussion model is that either party can start it. Had Tahir initially responded defensively to her bid for conversation, Amy could have begun the process of focusing on his feelings first. Then they would get to her feelings afterward.