Therapist Ronald Hoang on Five Keys to Happy, Lasting Marriages
An Interview With Nancy Landrum
Togetherness vs Separateness: This another one of the relational polarities that needs to be managed, rather than resolved. In healthy relationships there is a balance between separateness and togetherness, “the less free I am to leave you, the less I’ll stay, the more free I am to leave you, the more I’ll stay.” Healthy relationships are high engagement, low/balanced attachment.
Marriage is a complex journey that combines love, partnership, and mutual growth. To explore the foundations of successful marriages, we are talking to experienced marriage and family therapists. who guide couples through their challenges and triumphs. This series will delve into professional advice and strategies that foster long-lasting, fulfilling relationships. As a part of this series I had the pleasure of interviewing Ronald Hoang.
Ronald Hoang is a marriage and family therapist based in Sydney, Australia. He believes that relationships aren’t just an important thing, they are everything. With every a decade worth of experience, Ronald works with couples, individuals, families and children in enhancing their relationships, supporting clients with communication/conflict, trust/commitment, connection/intimacy, infidelity/betrayal, trauma and family problems.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what inspired you to become a therapist?
Growing up I struggled to make any kind of meaningful relationship. I couldn’t connect with others, I struggled to communicate, building trust felt impossible. It wasn’t until I was 18 years old where I finally made my first real connection. For the first time in my life, I felt seen. From that one experience, I learnt that relationships aren’t just an important thing, they’re everything. And that the quality of our relationships shapes the quality of our lives. And it was this experience that planted the seeds for my career. Now I work to support others to experience the same in their own relationships — to have meaningful, connected and authentic relationships with their loved ones.
What are some common misconceptions about marriage that you frequently encounter in your work?
The myth of compatibility. Differences in interests or personality don’t lead to relationship problems, it’s the inability to negotiate differences that IS the problem. Because choosing a partner is choosing a set of differences, it just depends on what kind. So it’s not about finding the right person, it’s about being the right person. Similarity doesn’t equal to relationship success. Compatibility is not a fixed state where one is a perfect fit for another, compatibility is a learning process that evolves over time through trial and error in relationship with another.
We should look to be complementary. Complementary means acceptance, tolerance and compromise — more about “how” less about “what”. It’s about integrating and negotiating the differences in our relationship. It’s learning to appreciate differences, and understanding that it’s the differences between you that makes your relationship richer, appreciating that the differences represent different strengths and being able to position your partner to set them up for success.
How can couples keep the romance alive, especially after many years together?
Keeping romance alive in a long-term committed relationship is about negotiating desire. Desire is the wanting. And wanting is a relational state, it’s the attraction between. Where it becomes a point of tension is when partners misconstrue desire as a trait, rather than a state. They attribute it to their partner becoming less desirable because they’ve gotten too comfortable or they haven’t taken care of themselves or they’ve become too familiar to be an object of YOUR desire. But desire is a state, not a trait. It’s an ongoing, active process. Desire is not an attribute one possesses. You don’t just lose the spark, you let it die out.
What are some common conflicts that couples face, and how can they resolve these conflicts in a healthy manner?
“Hot topics” amongst couples are typically around sex, money, division of labor, parenting or inlaws. However, it’s the underlying process which is what keeps couples in conflict — polarisation. Polarisation occurs across all conflicted topics and themes, it’s not about what the argument is about, more about how the argument is playing out. It’s not about the content, but the process, which makes it a transcendent issue that all couples struggle with.
Polarisation is where couples take opposing positions on a topic and they stand in those positions rigidly whilst trying to rein in their partner to join them in their position, but they get stuck. This comes about when fighting about right and wrong or reality and truth.
Polarisation is the inability to hold complexity, that two seemingly opposing positions could not possibly exist at the same time. It occurs when you split ambivalence, one partner becomes the proponent of one part of the ambivalence, whilst the other partner the other thereby assuming opposing sides, and couples argue as if the other persons position can’t exist.
Standing so firmly and rigidly in one position only acts to reinforce polarisation — you want to dig your heels in further when you feel a force trying to move you out of your own position. If you want to loosen a polarised position you need to acknowledge it. That is, recognising the existence of the opposing side — this is also known as validation.
How important is trust in maintaining a strong marital bond? What strategies do you recommend for rebuilding trust after it has been broken?
Trust is a core pillar in all committed relationships. Relationships are about balancing between the polarities of safety and risk. Successfully negotiating these polarities is how trust is built. People often believe that transparency gives birth to trust, but it also gives birth to surveillance. Trust is being able to sit with uncertainty. It’s built in drips and lost in buckets.
Can you share some practical communication techniques that couples can use to improve their relationship?
If every couple engaged in the speaker-listener technique I think many conflicts would resolve themselves. The speaker-listener is exactly as it sounds, one person is the designated speaker the other is the listener. The speakers role is to talk in detail from their own perspective (“I” statements) avoiding any criticism or blame, whilst the listener listens to understand what the speaker has to say, the listener can show understanding by paraphrasing what the speaker said, capturing to content and emotion, asking open questions to support the speaker to unpack, avoiding judgment, problem solving, defensiveness and minimising. You switch roles when the speaker feels they are fully understood.
It’s essentially learning to take turns. This structure is so foundational that we take it for granted. But it’s effective in avoiding escalation and feeling validated. A majority of conflicts aren’t resolvable, but what gets couples through is being able to feel understood.
What are five skills or concepts that you’ve found beneficial in your marriage that you also share when working with couples?
1 . Subjective realities: We live in subjective realities, which means what you see is different to what I see which is different to what the next person sees. It is possible that two seemingly opposing ideas can exist simultaneously. Being in relationship means navigating between subjective realities that are often at polar opposite ends.
If you’re fighting to be “right” and hold onto your truth, you’re fighting a losing battle. In relationship, when one person wins, the relationship loses. So it becomes a question of whether you want to be right or get IT right.
Relationships involve a level of acceptance, compromise and tolerance. Relationships require a level of differentiation — which is the ability to hold what is different. And when you’re able to do this, you’re able to validate a different version of reality to your own, you’re able hold the complexity and ambivalence, you create a space for the relationship to exist and grow.
2 . Complacency: What happens when you buy your dream house and do nothing to maintain it? The same happens in relationship. Complacency is a relationship killer. This is where partners no longer even try to connect or engage with one another, they take each other for granted, they become complacent. It comes about when couples fail to recognise that a relationship is not static, it’s dynamic. It’s not a checklist of milestones, but an ongoing active process that you continually nurture in partnership with another person.
3 . Compatibility/opposite personalities: This is a common narrative I hear from struggling couples. When couples tell me “we just have opposite personalities” I hear “we have trouble getting along” and “we have challenges negotiating our differences”. Opposite personalities is not a problem, unless it’s made a problem.
Where couples get stuck is trying to get their partner to fit their desired personality mold. This can be like trying to fit a square shape into a round hole. It just won’t fit. And if you think switching partners would solve the problem, think again. Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. The difference is the type of problems.
Instead of getting frustrated with you’re partner’s personality, understand that different personalities means different strengths. Appreciate that your partners personality thrives in a different environment to yours. Stop trying to shape your partner to fit into a particular hole, instead find the holes they fit best in. Look to set them up for success, rather than failure.
4 . Mindreading/Getting the love you want: As humans, we have a transparency bias — the tendency to overestimate the degree to which your personal mental state is known to others. In long-term relationships, we expect our significant other to know exactly what we’re thinking and feeling. The longer you’ve known each other the more perceptively accurate you should be, right? Wrong.
Studies have shown, when comparing newly married couples with couples who have been married for many more years, the perception of newly married couples is more accurate. Why? Because early in a relationship they don’t assume, they ask.
Many people decide to live in disappointment, rather than risk feeling disappointed. Not knowing that in relationship, disappointment is an opportunity for meaningful connection.
If you’re looking to get the love you want out of your relationship, ask for it. There is no such thing as mind reading — even when you’ve known someone for a lifetime. There should be more communication the longer you’ve been together, not less.
5 . Togetherness vs Separateness: This another one of the relational polarities that needs to be managed, rather than resolved. In healthy relationships there is a balance between separateness and togetherness, “the less free I am to leave you, the less I’ll stay, the more free I am to leave you, the more I’ll stay.” Healthy relationships are high engagement, low/balanced attachment.
Where it becomes an issue is if you become enmeshed — where there is complete togetherness and no sense of separateness (where 1+1=1). Partners begin to feel like they’re losing their identity and resentment builds in response to a lost sense of self. Or if there’s too much separateness, then there is simply no relationship. There needs to be a balance of both worlds.
How hard is it to practice what you teach couples in therapy?
There is an idea in psychology known as the wounded healer — essentially this is a person compelled to heal others as they themselves are wounded. In essence, healing others so they in turn can be healed. We often teach what we most need to learn, we give what we most need to be given and as therapists, we heal what we most deeply need healed. I didn’t get into relationship therapy because I’m an expert, I’m learning too!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Who has been the inspiration or model for your marriage? Can you share a story about that?
My in-laws are inspirations for myself and my wife in our own marriage. Through their own marriage they’ve managed to turn their wounds into wisdom. That show us that love is made, not found. Part of this is accepting that what makes your partner imperfect is what makes them great — they are live role-models for this.
Is there any particular book or concept that helped you overcome a turning point in your marriage?
Understanding relational complacency — which is when you bring the best part of yourself to work or out with friends and bring the leftovers home. When you take more care of the car or the dog than you do the relationship. Just because you’re in a relationship, you’ve shared your vows, started a family, doesn’t mean you don’t need to do anything else. A relationship can thrive, grow and flourish, just as easily as it can deteriorate, decline and die.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I’m hoping to make my work more accessible to people outside of my therapy room.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I honestly believe if we just listen to understand one another, the world would be a much less lonely place and there would be less conflict.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quotes”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One of my favorite quotes is: “I’d rather have you hate me for who I am, than love me for someone I’m not” — living this quote allowed me to be authentically myself and self-compassionate in my shortcomings.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Esther Perel — psychotherapist, author, speaker and thought leader in the relationship space of which I draw much of my inspiration.
How can our readers follow your work online?
Through my website www.ronaldhoang.com.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
About the Interviewer: At 79 years young, Nancy guides couples to transformative relationship skills, specializing in strategies for stepfamilies to succeed. Nancy brings her MA in Spiritual Psychology, personal experience and research proven strategies to guide couples to healthy communication skills and relationship happiness. Nancy has contributed to multiple media outlets including Huffington Post, Psych Central, and Woman’s Day magazine, to name a few. Nancy coaches in person, on Zoom, in her online courses at www.MillionaireMarriageClub.com , on “Relationship Rehab” TV and Talk and has authored eight books, including “How to Stay Married & Love It!” and “Stepping TwoGether: Building a Strong Stepfamily”. Nancy’s goal is to lower the divorce rate globally.
