Communication in Marriage: How to Keep the Fire Burning

When you combine time with certain things, it can have either a positive or a negative effect. Under the right conditions, time applied to squeezed grapes can produce fine wines of excellent vintage through the fermentation process. With the right kind of milk reacting with certain kinds of bacteria cultures in the proper conditions over time, you can produce cheeses of a wide variety, consistency, and taste.

That’s the good stuff. When you expose meat, or bread, or milk to the elements, the progress of time simply works to spoil them. What you have at the end of the day is a mess no one wants to deal with. That’s the bad stuff. The passage of time can make things better or worse – it depends on the conditions under which time is allowed to work.

This long and possibly over-extended metaphor is intended to communicate a key thing about marriage – the length of a marriage can either work on the relationship like a fine wine or rich cheese, or it can cause the relationship to spoil. It all hinges on a few key things.

One of those key things is whether the marriage relationship is characterized by healthy, clear, edifying communication or not. Great communication in marriage can foster an environment of trust, mutual understanding, forgiveness and so much more.

Poor communication in marriage can mean mismatched expectations and goals, mutual frustration, and breakdown in the relationship. When two people in a relationship are not communicating well, they’re likely pulling in two different directions, and partnerships rarely last under those conditions.

Communication takes various forms, which we’ll talk about a bit more later. Our words are a key component of communicating to others, but so are our actions, our body language, and tone of voice. All of these send messages to your spouse that affirm, encourage, edify, support, and show love to them.

Tips for Good Communication in Marriage

What are some of the things to keep in mind when communicating with your spouse to ensure that you keep the fires burning and your marriage maturing? Here are a few points to consider.

Make the time

It’s often told as a joke, but it’s remarkable to see how couples who are freshly fallen in love are toward one another. Goodness! The numerous texts, the interminable phone calls, the spontaneous (and planned) dates, gifts, and getaways – they want to spend time with one another and lavish their lover with attention, and no one has to tell them to do so.

The longer the relationship persists, the more the sense of familiarity sets in; you build routines, your own shorthand that other people may not get, and life gets busy. If kids or pets enter the picture, time to spend exclusively with your spouse outside of work and other commitments can get compromised. As life gets busier and you get used to one another, the frequent communication you had at the beginning can dwindle.

This is not to say that rich and meaningful communication can only happen when you keep up with the frequency and regularity of your premarital days; sometimes less is more.

It is to say, however, that you certainly do need a deep level of intentionality to overcome the entropy that can very easily degrade conversation to functional conversation about the kids, chores, and other necessary topics of conversation in a household. To keep talking about each other, to keep tabs on one another’s dreams, hopes, and fears, you need to create space and have time for such conversations.

A wise spouse will also know that their partner may have a different love language than theirs, and so will invest in taking opportunities to love them in a way they understand and hear. Communication is more than just words – it’s in actions as well as words. Some husbands and wives will appreciate a spontaneous deep hug more than a thousand words spoken in affirmation.

Over time, your spouse’s love language may change. Your spouse may have appreciated gifts, but when you have children, they may begin appreciating help around the house and with the children more. A simple “Thank you” can go a long way in a marriage. Knowing that and acting on it communicates your love in meaningful ways that keep love alive in a relationship.

Season with salt

One challenge within intimate relationships is maintaining civility and warmth in communicating as the years go by. Mildly irritating habits can become grating bugbears that drain our responses of grace.

Though addressed to Christians and instructing them on how to talk to people of no or other faiths, the words of Paul to the believers at Colosse may be helpful for us in a marriage context. He writes to them saying, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Colossians 4:6).

As you grow in communication in marriage, extending grace to one another may become more taxing with time. ‘Grace’ is showing someone unmerited favor, and as sinful human beings our store of it can quickly run out if the person disappoints or hurts us often enough.

Of course, we could say what we want to say with patience, sincerity, kindness, and respect, but at times it feels more cathartic and gratifying to lash out in anger, be sarcastic or ridicule. This can be through the tone of our voice, or it can just as powerfully be said with the rolling of the eyes, a snort, throwing hands up in the air or a deep sigh of resignation that says a thousand words about how deeply disappointed we are in our beloved.

While gratifying in the short term, the effect of not seasoning our conversation with salt is a build up of resentment in us, hurt in the other person, and a wall between the two of you. It is a monumental task to always be ‘full of grace’ and wholesome in the way we relate to others.

Mind the gap

Another helpful reminder for communication in marriage is to ‘mind the gap.’ This is part of showing grace to one another. When your spouse says something and the meaning is unclear, there’s a gap there. Sometimes they might say something, and the meaning is clear but negative toward you.

There’s a gap there too, albeit a different kind of gap. It’s challenging under such circumstances to pause, extend grace, and not assume the worst. It’s challenging to assume that they have good intentions and give them an opportunity to clarify what they said.

Often, the gap between what someone says and the intention you think lies behind it is filled with negative ascriptions – “Of course he said it to hurt me. That’s what he always does” or “She’s really mean. Why else would she say something like that?” Minding the gap simply means taking a beat and assuming the best of your spouse BEFORE assuming the worst.

It means giving them an opportunity to explain themselves before you arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes people don’t quite say what they mean, or we hear a tone of voice that’s not intended. If we fill the gap between what they’re saying and what they mean with negative assumptions, it can place you in a defensive posture before you even figure out what’s really going on.

All for one, and one for all

A marriage is a partnership. It’s not a game of one-upmanship in which you’re trying to catch one another out and ‘win.’ Sometimes spouses can approach an argument (arguments happen in marriages!) like a fight to the death. Like lawyers in a courtroom, the couple amasses evidence against one another, using any tactic including character assassination to make their point. This adversarial approach to arguments means that at the end of the day, no one comes out unscathed or innocent.

How you deal with disagreements matters. It can either bring you two closer together as you shape your joint life vision, or it can create a wedge that divides a couple. When engaging one another, it is important to approach the problem or disagreement as a unit, to do so in such a way that’s it’s clear you’re on the same team.

Extend forgiveness

When all is said and done, a marriage is a rich, complicated relationship between two sinners. You and your spouse will make mistakes. A relationship in which forgiveness is a feature is one in which the people involved can be human even while they’re being called to account for their failings. Forgiveness is not excusing – that’s another way of saying that forgiving a person is not saying that ‘nothing happened here.’

As C.S. Lewis once wrote, it’s seeing the ugliness and the inexcusable thing that someone has done and choosing not to hold it against them. For Christian marriage, our capacity and example for forgiving flows from God. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you,” says Ephesians 4:32.

Conclusion

Good communication in marriage is its lifeblood. Without it, a marriage is no longer a partnership but a loose association of individuals doing life in proximity to one another. Marriage is a complex, growing thing, and so how you communicate through the seasons of your marriage will change over time.

What worked at the beginning may not hold water in later years. Taking care to make time for one another, to be gracious toward each other, to assume the best before concluding the worst, to fight together, and be willing to extend forgiveness are all key components to communicating well and to a healthy marriage.