Why does it seem to take a million conversations to work out all our different issues?

"Why does it seem like we always need more conversations to work out our issues?  We’ve been married for so many years, it’s frustrating that he/she doesn’t get me by now!"  This is a complaint I’ve heard from clients enough that it’s worth digging into.  Does it mean you’re hopelessly mismatched and doomed to fail in your relationship? Probably not.

This is not a post about if you've discussed the same issue over and over, and can't make progress on it. That's another topic. This is about why there seem to be so many issues to work through.

Early in the dating process, you’re doing a limited set of things. If you’re like most couples, you probably tried to make sure the things you were doing when you spent time together were fun! And when you’re just doing fun stuff, there’s not really that much you need to understand about the other person to have a good time.  Think of engaging in sex for example: that doesn’t require a lot of sophisticated conversation to enjoy, right?  Things are simple, easy, and fun.

And you’re not dependent on each other. What do you need to coordinate?  Figuring out when you’re going to get together? Who’s going to bring the snacks? Who’s going to pay for the activities? It’s not nothing, but as you’ll see, it won’t always be this way as a relationship progresses.

As your lives get more intertwined, you’re probably spending even more time together. You may have decided to move in together. Then, you might need to discuss how major expenses get shared. Who’s responsible for which household chores, etc.

Eventually you may get to the point of getting married and starting a family.  Now there are exponentially more things you have to coordinate on. Planning stuff for your future. Dealing with in-laws and how involved they’ll be. Buying and maintaining a house. Caring for sick relatives.  Raising children. And it goes on. These are even just high-level descriptions that don’t get into the day-to-day details of how you actually take care of these things (which means, it’s quite a lot of stuff to try to coordinate).

Since there are exponentially more things to do, there are also exponentially more opportunities for you to have mismatched expectations or beliefs about how this stuff is all supposed to work, or just preferences for how you would like to approach these things. This doesn’t mean anyone is necessarily right or wrong, it just means there are differences between the two of you.

Another way to put this, when you aren’t aware of the beliefs or expectations or preferences someone has, is that you don’t understand them. And when someone acts in a way that you’re not happy with, and you don’t understand them, that combination is likely to make you think they’re stupid, a jerk, or just crazy.

When you do understand their behavior, you still may not agree with their point of view, but it’s not nearly as aggravating. When there’s a difference but you find it understandable, you tend to see it as a task you have to negotiate to resolve.  There’s a big difference between this, and not understanding that causes negative emotions and resentment.

Think back to early dating again.  It is very likely you’ve been on dates with people, where they acted in ways that you didn’t understand. It’s likely those things annoyed and aggravated you, and when the level of commitment was minimal, you probably just bailed, or declined to continue to date them. It’s easy to do this since the level of investment and commitment isn’t high, and there’s arguably nothing wrong with that since it naturally filters out people we aren’t compatible with. So back to your relationship, it’s not that you’ve suddenly realized your spouse has really been crazy this whole time, in fact they probably passed a lot of tests along the way and you wouldn’t be with them if they were so aggravating and annoying from the start. 

Even if you are the kind of person who’s naturally less inclined to feel the need to know deeply about the other person, there’s some level of it that’s unavoidable if you’re interdependent. It just works better if you understand them. And how do you make this understanding happen?  There’s pretty much one way to do it.  To talk about it without turning into an argument.  And since there are so many possible scenarios to think about, there are going to be a lot of necessary conversations to coordinate these things.

So settle in for the long run.  Realize that part of being in a relationship that lasts is having lots of conversations where you start from a position of having different perspectives.  I think we’d all love it if it felt like we could put things on autopilot.  But autopilot is like early dating in a way, in that it works for only a very limited set of situations. That’s a piece of cake compared to living a whole life next to someone else.