Making It Last Forever
You can predict how close you are to a breakup by simply observing your relationship’s communication style. In most relationships, partners must engage in three types of talks to keep everything working. You may not have noticed it yourself, but a quick analysis of the things you say to your partner can be put into three main buckets:
- Nagging Talks: Conversations where one or both partners complain about the other.
- Planning Talks: Conversations where partners are planning things that will happen in the future.
- Loving Talks: Heart-to-heart conversations between partners about everything and nothing.
The percentage distribution between these buckets can easily predict the health and longevity of the relationship months or even years before the breakup.
Nagging Talks
Nagging talks include everything from complaining about each other to the daily annoyance that reminds you that your partner is not perfect. Some nagging talks are shared vocally through thoughtful conversations, others through fights and others are kept inside until one cannot take it anymore. People deal with frustration differently, so the frequency of these talks depends on how you and your partner deal with frustration.
Depending on how they are performed, nagging talks can bring the couple together or further push them apart. Often time, it’s the latter because we suck at communicating our feelings and frustrations. We don’t like to be reminded how imperfect we are, and these moments often highlight how demanding how partners are. There is no way to remove nagging talks from your relationships, but there are ways to improve them by learning to communicate better. Over time, when nagging talks dominate communication, partners on the receiving end feel like they’re walking on eggshells and start to check out mentally.
Planning Talks
Planning talks are the trickiest of them all because it feels like partners are communicating clearly and they’re on the same page. But when we pay close attention, we realize that they’re not paying attention to each other because they’re always planning the next thing: the wedding, the next purchase, the next kid, the next vacation, the next bills, etc. And because there is always tomorrow, planning talks never stops. The issue with planning talks is that they are necessary for the relationship, but they’re not the only important thing. Usually, one partner leads the discussions, making all the plans and the other partners get busy executing the projects. Both are exhausted because it never stops; every big plan creates many small plan that needs to happen.
Unlike nagging talks, planning talks create the illusion of unity. Partners feel they’re on the same page, on the same team, and want the same thing until there is nothing else to plan or that one partner can’t take it anymore. The classic example is the married couple who gets busy raising the kids, keeping everybody together until the day all the kids are gone, and the couple doesn’t know what to do with each other. They feel like roommates, wondering what happened to them.
Planning talks are often stressful for couples because plans for the future often imply that the future will be better than today. That you will make more money, you will get the next promotion; you will have more time, etc. Most plans are built upon future expectations that haven’t been realized yet, which stresses the partner who needs to realize these expectations to enable the couple to make the plan happen.
When planning talks dominate the relationship, it’s hard to find the right moment to share non-exciting news, from ‘Honey, I didn’t get the promotion to ‘I actually don’t want to do it this year’ because we don’t want to disappoint our partners or let them down when they relied on us to get that specific thing done and already made plans accordingly. Planning talks push partners apart when there is no more room to share minor inconveniences. Eventually, minor inconveniences become major and too big to hide.
The saddest part about planning talks is that whenever a partner can’t take it anymore and wants to break up, it always surprises the other partner. You hear things like ‘I don’t understand, we wanted the same thing, we planned our future, we had plans…’ unfortunately, the answer is just that, you only had plans.
Loving Talks
Loving talks are also tricky because they are the hardest to maintain. Nagging and planning talks can happen every day; in fact, they do. On the other end, loving talks rely on a fully loaded trust bucket to happen over and over again. As mentioned above, loving talks are honest heart-to-heart conversations about everything and nothing. Keywords here are everything and nothing because, as humans, we need to feel safe first before we can be vulnerable. Within a relationship, feeling safe implies that you can open yourself up and share your fears, insecurities, dreams and fantasies without judgment. It also means that you will get the proper support from your partner whenever you raise issues, and this is where things get tricky.
It’s hard to see our loved ones go through hard times in life, so our instinct every time someone we love talks about something they’re dealing with is to try to find a solution for them. While our problems always seem to be the most complicated, other people’s problems seem extremely simple. Things are rarely as simple as they seem, and your partner knows it. That’s why they are sharing it with you. They’re not asking you to fix it for them. We lose trust points whenever we rush into solutions they know won’t work. While they may trust us for the house finances, they might not trust us with the problems they face personally, at work or with their family, for instance. And just like a child learn to avoid talking about things that will get them in trouble, your partner will learn never to bring it up to you very quickly.
The reason we lose trust points when we try to solve our loved ones’ problems instead of just listening to them is that they can’t tell if the reason you want a solution as fast as possible is that you think it’s a waste of your time to listen to them or because you care. It’s counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense. To open up to someone, you need to believe that the person you’re opening up to can receive the news (good or bad) and won’t make it worse. Something very few of us can constantly do.
Furthermore, we lose many trust points when our partners share their insecurities and we use them against them during arguments. Every time we use, explicitly or implicitly, our partner’s secrets against them, the trust bucket drops a lot of points until it’ll comes a time when you won’t be trusted with particular topics. It’s not the end of the world at first, but very soon, you’ll realize that there is an aspect of your partner’s life that they’re not willing to share with you. If they can’t share with you, they can’t talk about it; it’ll be hard for you to realize how that impacts your relationship until it is too late. I defined loving talks as the ability to talk with your partner about everything and nothing because it is only when you’re allowed to be weird that your true self emerges. When loving talks dominate the relationship, partners are closer than ever, and the relationship is solid. The inability to have more loving talks with a partner is also a clear sign that something is off.
What can we do
Loving talks should dominate our relationships, so the question is what to do with nagging and planning talks; because they are necessary and part of healthy relationships. Planning talks should be scheduled and not spontaneous. Organizing these talks is important because while there is always one partner who can’t stop thinking, dreaming and talking about the plan, the other partner might want to relax or do something fun with their time. Scheduling enables both partners to be mentally and emotionally engaged in planning the next thing during the allocated time; the over-excited partner can also get the satisfaction that they got the full attention of their lover. Any long-term relationship requires planning; we plan our vacations, Christmas, groceries, big purchases, etc. Because they need input from both, both partners should be engaged during the conversation. The mistake we all make is not to schedule it and then get frustrated when our lovers ignore what we’re saying.
Done well, nagging talks should disappear because they can be swallowed within loving talks. If we can talk about everything and nothing, we should be able to talk about things that aren’t going well within the relationship without turning the conversation into a fight. It’s not easy and requires a lot of effort to clearly communicate our feelings and listen to what we’re being told without taking things personally. It’s not easy, but unfortunately, that’s the only way to remove nagging talks from the equation. You want to remove them because they will most likely happen anyway, but a loss less frequently than usual.
The communication distribution should be 80% loving talks and 20% planning talks. For healthy couples, they are most likely something like 60% loving talks, 30% planning talks and 10% nagging talks. Pay attention to this ratio so you can take the appropriate action and steer the relationship in the right direction.
Why you can’t compete with your partner’s secret lover
Unfortunately, many people experience infidelity within their lifetime. It’s an experience that leaves many scars and sometimes turns otherwise reasonable people into unlovable beings. There are only two golden rules for infidelity. The first one: Don’t do it; the second: If you do, never get caught. The reason why infidelity causes so many problems in relationships and people’s lives are that people constantly break these two straightforward rules.
In the public discourse, the popular question is often “why do men cheat,” and the popular answer is “well, women cheat too.” This never leads people to the correct answer because the right question should always be, ‘why did my (ex)partner cheat on me?’. It’s a question that forces us to review the relationship, especially the communication style and be honest with ourselves.
The relationship between your partner and his mistress (or the male equivalent) is similar to that between a nephew and his aunt. For the nephew, his mom is the ultimate provider; she’s with him, and she provides food, love, affection, etc. But also provide discipline, yell at him when she gets mad, ask him to stop running in public, ‘force’ him to go to bed early, etc. Meanwhile, the aunt comes in, plays with him for hours, brings gifts and leaves just before his mom comes to ruin the party. Nothing the mom can do will make her cooler than her sister. She can be the cool aunty with her sister’s kids, but she will always be a mom to her kids.
Similarly, to your partner, you are the person they love, the person they want to spend their life with, the person they want to start a family with, etc. But you are also the person that reminds them how imperfect they are, the person they argue the most with, the person that stresses them the most, the person they have to listen to complaining about them, life, work, her and your family, her and your friends, etc. While the mistress, or the male equivalent, is pure playtime. It doesn’t even matter if they’re not as good-looking or educated as you; what matters is what they represent; an escape from reality.
Cheating is always a risk and reward decision split — the risk of losing what we have today and the reward of getting intimate with a new lover. Many factors come into play in that decision; the communication style plays a significant factor, but also the partner’s assessment of the consequences of getting caught. The latter is out of your control; you can and should pay close attention to the former.
It would help if you also defined what is cheating to you. Cheating is a concept that needs to be defined within the relationship. It means different things to different people. At school, cheating is copying another student’s work. Bribing the referee and taking performance-enhancing drugs are two ways to cheat in sports. Similarly, in relationships, for some people, cheating is solely having sex with another person; for others, watching porn alone is cheating. Many couples run into trouble because cheating means different things to both partners. Making sure that you and your partners have the same understanding of the concept is the first step, often missed, of a solid long term relationship.
You can’t compete with your partner’s lover, but you can and should create the right environment for you and your partner to occasionally escape from reality. An enjoyable thing for couples is having scheduled play time; evenings or days where no one can complain or say no. Very simple, but it forces both of you to be positive and share quality time away from everyday life’s drama. Ironically, doing so creates a reality you don’t have to escape from and brings you closer to your partner.
Love never dies of natural death; making it last forever is a choice. A choice we must constantly renew every day. How we talk to our partners highly influences their willingness to make that choice tomorrow; paying attention to these three bucket is key to improving your chances of making it last forever.
I write about my experiences, entrepreneurship and stoicism on medium, and tweet at @NedNadima.