Loving the One You’re With: Maintaining Great Communication in Marriage

It’s a sad reality, but sometimes the people we pay the least attention to are those closest to us. The more time you spend with someone, the more your senses can become dulled to the amazing person that they are. It takes intentionality and imagination to revel in the mundane and continue appreciating the common things in our lives. The same is true for communication in marriage.

In a marriage, the spouses are drawn into a shared life, rubbing shoulders daily with one another and standing together through the highs, lows, and everything in between. It’s not always sexy or glamorous, but marriage is rich, deep, joyful, and the adventure of a lifetime.

To walk with a spouse for life requires great communication – that’s how you let each other know your thoughts, desires, ambitions, hurts, and hopes. Great communication helps you navigate the conflict that inevitably comes in intimate, long-term relationships, and it’s how you encourage one another in times of hardship.

The other side of that is having poor communication, which means struggling to connect and build intimacy, conflict escalating unnecessarily, and missed opportunities for sharing life. To love your spouse well as you go through life and grow old together, having great communication will be an immense help.

Obstacles to Communication in Marriage

There are many reasons why a couple can struggle with communication in marriage. They can be competent in socializing with other people, such as siblings, co-workers, and friends, but struggle to engage each other. Some of the reasons are laid out below, and then later we’ll explore various ways to improve communication in marriage.

Learned behavior

Struggling with communication may be due to learned behavior. In marriage, you need to share all of yourself with your spouse, but not everyone is comfortable sharing their emotions and thoughts, for example. Maybe you were once too trusting of others, and painful experiences have now made it hard to share yourself.

That can carry over into a marriage, which is supposed to be a safe space. Or it may be that in your family, people were not effusive with their emotions, and so you never quite developed proficiency and comfort with expressing what you’re feeling in words.

Conflict and relational damage

Things can change within a marriage, and a couple that had great communication can find themselves feeling disconnected and distant from each other. This can be the result of unresolved conflict or a situation where damage has been inflicted on the relationship.

If you’re having an argument, and one or both of you say something hurtful, that hurt can make it hard to find one another again. Something like infidelity or another form of deep betrayal can rock a marriage, causing the couple to retreat and undermining communication in the relationship.

Anger and resentment

Conflict that is prolonged by the couple not making moves to forgive one another or compromise can cause resentment, which taints communication with distrust, assumptions, and poor listening. Without these, communication becomes a minefield, one which the couple might become reluctant to traverse because you never know when more hurt can be caused.

If one or both of the people in the marriage have an anger issue, that can make communication difficult; it’s hard to speak openly if that might trigger an angry reaction, and when you’re angry it’s hard to hear another person, and engage them with empathy.

Poor listening skills

Most people think that they are great listeners, but that’s true far less often than one might think. Between short attention spans, being distracted by constant emails and text messages, a lack of coordination between our verbal and non-verbal cues, and interrupting others to make our opinions heard, we often aren’t very good listeners.

When you listen to someone, they need to leave the conversation feeling heard, and that isn’t always the case. Communication isn’t just about talking; it’s also largely about hearing what the other person wants and responding to that need. Many of us simply haven’t developed great listening skills, and that hampers great communication in marriage.

Lack of time

Lastly, another obstacle to great communication in marriage is the lack of time. To be sure, being busy can be overcome to achieve healthy communication for a couple. However, when your life is full, it’s hard to slow down and pay attention to details.

A couple can find themselves communicating just enough to do life together and get to everything that needs doing – taking the dog to the vet, picking the kids up from school, getting the car serviced or the landscaper in for some work in the backyard – but all the while missing the deeper moments of connection. Our lives are busier than ever, and without a deliberate effort to connect, a couple can miss each other.

Opportunities to improve

Any damage done in a marriage that ends up hindering great communication isn’t necessarily irreversible. Healing can happen for a couple, and their ability to communicate deeply, meaningfully, and without frustration can be established and restored. It may require getting help from a marriage and family therapist to reopen lines of communication and learn how to communicate well, but it’s possible.

Allow yourself to be surprised and curious

In the book The Mystery of Marriage, there is this amazing quote:

Marriage is living with glory. It is living with an embodied revelation, with a daily unveiling and unraveling of the mystery of love in such a way that our intense yet shy curiosity about such things is in a constant state of being satisfied, being fed, yet without ever becoming sated. It is living with a mystery that is fully visible, with a flesh-and-blood person who can be touched and held, questioned and probed and examined and even made love to, to our heart’s content, but who nevertheless proves to be utterly and impenetrably mysterious, infinitely contemplable – Mike Mason.

When you’re with someone for a while, you can begin to take them for granted and stop paying attention. This quote from Mike Mason is a great reminder that the person you’re married to is infinitely complex and mysterious. Our eyes sometimes need help to see just how amazing we and the people around us are. When we are wonderstruck, that allows us to look anew at our world, ask questions, and probe what we thought we knew.

Allow yourself to be surprised by your spouse and be curious about them. Remember those earlier days when you were just beginning to know one another? That was a time of discovery, of knowing the unknown. People are always growing, and part of growing together is being a front-row witness to this growth into whoever God is molding them to be. Remind yourself of the adventure you’re on, and that just might draw you to talk with your spouse more, to explore one another anew.

Be intentional about connecting

Like everything else in life, the stuff worth having is worth fighting for. Great communication will help you have less conflict in your marriage, and resolve conflict better. Busy lives, our reluctance to dig deep into ourselves and to be vulnerable – all this and more conspires to rob couples of deep and meaningful intimacy. To nurture a marriage and strengthen your communication, you must be intentional about connecting, because it won’t happen by itself.

Where possible, check in with each other during the day, set aside time at the end of the day to unwind together over a glass of wine, have a regular date night tocatch up, and have a phone and email-free zone in your relationship so you can have uninterrupted time together, and make use of opportunities such as marriage retreats to help you reconnect.

Great communication requires taking intentional steps to be vulnerable and time to listen and connect. It also requires learning how best to communicate with each other so that you’re on the same wavelength.

The importance of forgiveness and a good reset button

When hurt occurs in a relationship, it can challenge good communication as you retreat into your own world for safety. In every marriage, being able to forgive your spouse and come back to the table is a key ingredient to keeping the lines of communication open.

Forgiveness doesn’t erase the hurt caused, but it allows you to reset your relations and remain open to each other. Forgiveness makes us somewhat vulnerable, but without it, resentment, frustration, and pain will be the only things left.

The words of Paul are indispensable in how people in the Church relate to each other, but also for how a married couple should treat each other:

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you – Ephesians 4:32, NIV

Finding Help: Christian Marriage Counseling

Your marriage matters and the lifeblood of a successful marriage is great communication. You may need to learn how to listen with empathy, how to develop emotional intimacy with your spouse through conversation, or how to resolve conflict and find each other again after hurting each other. Whatever your unique challenges in your marriage, it’s possible to improve your communication and your marriage.

Couples counseling is an avenue that’s worth exploring so you and your spouse can improve communication in your marriage and reconnect. Through exercises to develop intimacy, effective listening skills, and by providing you with a safe space to learn how to express your emotions, your counselor can help you and your spouse take your marriage to the next level.

The counseling space is non-judgmental and designed to help you and your spouse achieve your goals and overcome the obstacles that prevent emotional intimacy, so don’t hesitate to reach out and make an appointment for your risk-free initial assessment.