How do you improve communication in your marriage?

How do you improve communication in your marriage?  A lot of people are looking for the answer for it. 

Communication is very vague across the board. So when you're asking the question of how do I improve communication in my marriage, my question back to you is going to be what kind of communication?

 Are you wanting to improve the positive, light hearted friendship type of communication in your marriage, where you are just able to talk and have fun? And laugh? 

Or are you looking to improve the communication, where you're in the middle of disagreeing about something and you feel like your spouse just isn't listening to you, or maybe you aren't actively fighting, but you have certain expectations that you have thought of, and are keeping in your mind that you're hoping that your spouse will live up to, but you haven't exactly communicated what those are? 

 For this, I will be using those three categories to give the answer of how you can improve communication in your marriage.

 And even then, I'm still sure that there are other facets of communication that could still work to be improved upon. But overall, those are the three that we're going to deal on . So the first one is, how do I improve communication with my spouse? 

And if you're wanting to improve communication, let's go back to the basic definition of communication. Communication is a person who is sending a message that the other person receives, and then gives feedback back that they haven't received it.

 At its basic core, that is what communication is. But when we're looking at a marriage, when we're looking at two people who love each other, and are supposed to love each other until death do us part, communication needs to not just be a bunch of back and forth effects, because that's where it starts to feel like a job. 

And that's where you can start to feel like you don't want to be a part of it. Like it's getting mundane, it's getting monotonous, and you want to do something else to spice it up. So let's start looking at communication as a mode of Communication in which you can spice up your marriage.

 Think back when you and your spouse were dating, you communicated, you talked about things that you had shared interest about, about things that both of you found important to each other. You talked about the day, the news, your dreams, your future, your past, your hurts stories from your past, those were likely things that you engaged in and talked about all the time.

 And it's a type of communication. It's the type of communication that builds friendship, and friendship is the basis of intimacy. And intimacy is one of the three areas of love. And when we look at the research of what love is, according to Dr. Sternberg, we see that love is comprised of intimacy, passion, and commitment.

 Intimacy is the communication where you're best friends with each other. Alternatively, but in line with in the intimacy, part of communication, talking about things you both enjoy connecting with each other on shared hobbies, and things like that is also part of how we are attracted to another person through what we call intellectual attraction, which is one of the four types of ways that we are attracted to other people before our physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

 So with intellectual attraction, it's sharing a set of hobbies together, or even if you don't share the same initial enjoyment in those hobbies, it is showing interest in the hobbies that your spouse has, and them showing interest in yours, which gives you more things to talk about. 

So if you want to improve your communication, then it's great to start with the communication that allows you to be best friends, sharing about what's going on what you're struggling with, where you need help, where you need support, where you need encouragement, that allows you to be best friends, in fact, in the fitness world, which is something that I am personally passionate about.

 I love working out. I love focusing on fitness and health and all of those things. There's something that we know when it comes to fitness levels, especially especially specifically like cardiovascular fitness.

 you think of it like a pyramid and stay with me, it's going to come back to communication. If you think of physical fitness like a pyramid, then you need a really strong base foundation in order to build your max capacity on top of so a lot of times this is used in cardiovascular training, to state that you don't need to be running full out sprint efforts every day.

 You actually need to have a really strong base of being able to run at a conversational pace, the majority of the time, and that allows you the ability to have a stronger or a higher pinnacle of being able to run all out sprints at a faster pace. How does that all connect with this that we're talking about? If you want to be able to handle the hard stuff together, if you want to be able to have difficult conversations and disagree, or have conflict, but still love each other afterward, then it's important to have the strong

 foundation of intimacy, of friendship, of seeing each other as each other's best friend, because that builds the trust that allows you to have more difficult conversations in the future. So then what's the next bucket we want to cover? 

Expectations from the couples  should be communicated and not to assume that the  other couple knows what the other expects, you are not mind readers.

 Therefore, it is important that you communicate it clearly with love, what your expectations are. So something such as, when can we start cleaning? When can we do this together? How are we going to break up the tasks between the two of us opening it as a conversation, bringing him into the loop instead of just assuming that he's going to help me? And then stomp around angry when he doesn't?  Where are your expectations? 

 For our third category, we're going to address what to do to better communicate in the middle of disagreeing. Similar to the last point, there's unmet expectations and unmet needs that likely come in to almost every disagreement. In fact, one of the things that we know from the research is that 60% of disagreement 60% of the things that you and your spouse fight about are never going to be resolved.

  Most of the reasons that those conflicts are never going to be resolved, is because you are two different people with two different outlooks on life, two different upbringings and two different experiences. And so the things that you ultimately would love to see happen in the way that you want to see them happen.

Again, they're not always realistic. And the beauty of marriage and the beauty of great relationships is, you're not always going to get everything you want.

 Why is that the beauty of great relationships, because if I was in a relationship, where I constantly just got what I wanted all of the time, and didn't have to put any work into it, I wouldn't treasure it.

. But when we bring in the mindset of how can I love unconditionally, how can I help my spouse meet their needs, it breeds a much better relationship, that's the kind of relationship everyone wants to be in.

 If you and your spouse both thought that way about each other, don't you know that communication would be better and conflict would be better. So it's actually kind of good news that 60% of the time, you're not going to fully agree. 

But it gives you the opportunity 60% of the time, to show the other person you love them, by listening to them by trying to understand why they're, by listening to them by trying to understand where they're coming from, and by compromising, and that's the key here, when you disagree about something, try and shift your mindset away from proving your point and getting your way into listening to understand. 

That's a very mature mindset to have. And it's very difficult to do especially at first. And it's not that it necessarily ever gets easy, it just gets a little easier to do that.

 It doesn't mean it's always easy to hold back and listen when you're really wanting to prove your point. But, if you take that approach, it will make a huge difference in the way that you and your spouse, not just fight, but the outcome that you both can come to. 

in conclusion, focus on building a friendship by talking about things that build intimacy. The second one is to realize where your unmet and unrealistic expectations are, and shift those to not have so many unmet or unrealistic expectations. Make your expectations realistic and communicate them. 

Thirdly, realize that disagreeing about something is actually an amazing opportunity to lean in, listen to your spouse and show them that you love them by trying to make a compromise on what to do next.