Couples therapist Joanna Harrison encounters this argument regularly in her consulting room – and that’s no bad thing, she says.
It’s a couple’s first session with me and, as always, I begin by asking them why they have come to a couple therapist for help. Like so many of the people who have sat in those chairs before them, the answer comes down to one thing. “Well, we are struggling to communicate,” says the woman. “It’s true; we’ve stopped being able to talk about even the little things without having an argument,” her partner agrees without hesitation.
This isn’t a revelation. It’s something most of us have probably recognised in a relationship at some point. But probe what may seem like a trivial argument over the washing up and you can see that they’re really about communication and, if seized, an opportunity to get better at it. It’s in these moments when we so often get each other wrong, even with the best of intentions, and we’re left with an angry feeling of “you never listen to me”.
Let’s take, for example, a situation that is familiar to me from my consulting room. A woman in a relationship is feeling overwhelmed by her Christmas to-do list. She’s feeling anxious about getting Christmas sorted in the way she wants to for her family in time. It means a lot to her. She tells her partner that she is feeling anxious, and he says, “You don’tto feel anxious. Just cut yourself some slack – we don’t need to get it all perfect.
My view is that these sorts of arguments are inevitable between couples. We are going to get it wrong with each other. We are going to bring different communication styles to our relationships, and different concerns that we are trying to get across. When a couple has an argument like this, I think it can give them an opportunity, if they can dare to be curious, to learn something important about each other.
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