Talking About Hard Subjects Can Save Your Marriage Before Problems Occur

Most young couples enter marriage with a Fairy Tale mentality. More time together with their spouse. An extension of the carefree dating life. Sex.

We all start out thinking this way to some extent.

But dating and marriage are two entirely different entities, and there are several important questions people considering getting married should ask their future spouse to prepare for any potential challenges down the road.

These are hard questions couples don’t like to ask each other while dating, but as a person who has been married for 21 years, I assure you these questions will help you down the road when things may start to get a bit more difficult.

Is pre-marital counseling necessary?

I realize most people probably don’t do premarital counseling, and even if you do it with your fiance, certain questions might not get asked. My wife and I were not asked these questions in counseling with a pastor and a therapist.

That’s right … we met with a pastor and therapist and took a pre-marital class at our church. My wife thought that we could deal with all our issues prior to getting married and our relationship would become devoid of any problems.

But pre-marital counseling is more about learning to develop communication skills more than it is trying to fix every problem area in a relationship. It’s about getting comfortable with talking about those more difficult subjects.

“If you want to have a great relationship, the way you handle differences matters more than what those differences are.”

Howard J. Markman, “Fighting For Your Marriage”

Asking the hard questions

The hard questions coming up are from Kate Swenson’s heart-wrenching 2018 story, “I Blame Autism For My Divorce” in Today Parenting blog.

Kate and her then-fiance, Jamie, gave up a weekend to attend classes for engaged couples at her church. It was one of those events that were long and seemed completely unnecessary because they were madly in love, she says.

The class centered on the “deep” questions to encourage discussion on topics couples might not have talked about in the dating process. It was the kind of questions most guys would rather stick a fork in their eye than talk about.

They were thought-provoking questions like:

How would you handle a partner with an addiction?

Or a partner that lies?

Or a partner who gambles?

— Kate Swenson, “I Blame Autism For My Divorce”

As twenty-something kids, Kate said they breezed through the questions with the arrogance of people who didn’t foresee any of them as potential problems. I would’ve had the same attitude as Kate and her fiance in my late twenties.

The final question of the weekend was, “How would the two of you handle a child with special needs?” Kate and her future spouse scribbled down their answer in their workbook, We’d love that baby just like any other baby.

Would you be ready for this?

And off they went on to live their Fairy Tale wedding, honeymoon, marriage, careers, new home, and … then they had a child with special needs.

“And with the blink of an eye we were the parents to a nonverbal little boy with severe autism and the crack in the foundation of our marriage was formed.”

— Kate Swenson, Autism mom

You can read the rest of Kate’s story, “I Blamed Autism for My Divorce.” It is a gut-wrenching story of what it means to be a special needs parent — an aspect that most engaged couples never think about possibly happening to them.

But the story is just as much about how two people, who love each other, respond differently to the autism diagnosis, and they lose sight on their relationship while hyper-focusing on trying to support their autistic child.

Noticing the danger signs

Their story is about seeing the danger signs in your communication patterns:

1. Escalation: Little arguments escalate to ugly fights.
2. Invalidation: Criticizing or belittling a partner’s opinion.
3. Negative interpretations: Falsely viewing a partner’s words.
4. Withdrawal and avoidance: Holding back from honest communication.

These danger signs come from Markman’s “Fighting For Your Marriage,” co-written by Scott M. Stanley and Susan L. Bloomberg, and the three therapists agree that how you start talking on a topic determines how that talk ends up.

You start talking while angry … the conversation gonna remain heated.

Talk about the deep questions

Talking about the “deep” questions with your future spouse can strengthen your communication and relationships before getting married. But it can also provide a battle strategy for handling any future challenges if they do occur.

You can simply say, “This is what we said we do if this happened to us.”

So many problems in a marriage can be prevented before they occur if couples take a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. Consider that you are saving yourself pain and money by discussing these questions in advance.

The money you save by learning to communicate and discussing how you’d handle different situations can go for vacations than on counseling sessions.

But if you learn to talk about hard subjects now it will fortify your marriage. Don’t take my word on it, though. Here’s what marriage researchers say about the importance of good communication within a lasting marital relationship.

After many years of research, John Gottman determined that 96 percent of the time the success of a conversation between couples relates to how they begin talking about an issue, whether it starts in a positive or negative tone.

“If you start out angry when you raise a concern, the resulting talk is likely to be an angry one. [But] if you start out on a positive note, you are very likely to be able to keep the conversation on that level.”

— Susan L. Blumberg, “Fighting For Your Marriage”

Start talking positive and don’t avoid the hard subjects. That’s the best advice I wish someone had given me twenty-one years ago before getting married.

Thank you for reading my story.

—

Previously Published on medium

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