Saving Your Marriage: Examine Communication in Your Relationship
When trying to decide whether or not to continue your marriage, many questions can arise. Whatever next step you take, you want to be sure you are making the best decision for yourself and your future. We recommend that you take a deep breath and a step back and tune into how you feel about your relationship.
As you take note of your feelings, pay particular attention to the communication tendencies in your marriage. This will give you more information to help you with the decision and possible changes ahead. If you’ve ever talked on a cell phone, it is likely that you have experienced disruption in your conversation.
Whether the other person is driving through a tunnel or moving into an out ofsignal zone, parts of the conversation can be lost, static makes for hard hearing, or the connection is completely cut off. Maybe you were sharing feelings that weren’t easy to speak. Or perhaps you were asking the other person to pickup something from the store. It goes without saying that a strained or cut off phone connection doesn’t feel good and makes it more difficult for you to get what you want. This is also true of communication lines in a marriage. When there is disconnection and both people are unable to speak and really hear oneanother, frustration, misunderstandings and further disconnection often occur.
Perhaps you communicate with one another clearly and lovingly about certain topics, but the connection cuts out on others. Or maybe it seems that everything you try to talk about goes the wrong way or isn’t heard in the first place. As you consider the important decision of whether to stay or leave your marriage, take a moment to answer these questions about communication.
1. Do you feel safe sharing your feelings with your spouse?
2. Do you feel like your partner listens to you when you talk?
3. Are there things that you would say to your partner if it felt safer to do so?
4. Are there specific topics that you or your spouse are unwilling to talk about? If yes, what are they and why is there an unwillingness to talk about them?
While answering these questions may not give you a final answer about whether to stay in your marriage, they will help you see the communication patterns that your partnership is based on more clearly. Regardless of your decision, you can set the intention to communicate more openly and honestly with the people in your life.
