Improving Our Relationship Skills
From 10 Lessons for Men…and how our partners can help
Bottom line: if you want to be successful in ALL relationships, the best thing you can do is to make the other person feel heard and spend time with them. If you already do that perfectly, you may skip the rest of this. Otherwise, read on.
There’s a disturbing revelation in Dr. John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. At about the age of 7, boys tend to stop playing with girls and pursue more violent activities with other boys, paying less and less attention to relationships. Think about the implications of that. This means that at a very early age, boys (for whatever reason) have not only started down a path of less attention to relationships, but have also begun to focus more and more on violent behavior. Over a lifetime, this can impact everything from connection with a partner to communication and relationship maintenance at work. As a boy, we get the message that relationship stuff is “girly.” This obviously changes in adulthood because in our Men in Balance survey, 65% of men say they feel isolated in their personal life, and 67% would like to be better able to open up and talk with other men about personal issues.
Anger is Okay
Of course some of men’s tone deafness in relationships is benign, but as we have noted before, men sometimes have difficulty expressing emotions–with the exception of anger. This is the one emotion that we learn early and seems to be universally allowed/encouraged for men and boys. The result is that we overuse this emotion and fail to develop our use of others (e.g. empathy). Consequently, the risk is that we may become one-dimensional in our emotional makeup, and, as a result, miss out on the fruits of close relationships and fail to learn key skills such as conflict resolution and collaboration. An important note here: If you are having serious anger issues or your partner has expressed concern about your expression of anger, get help. This is not likely something you can fix by yourself. Start with some books about anger management, then get some counseling. Unmanaged or unmanageable anger can be a sign of untreated depression, which is anger turned inward. A competent counselor can tell you if this is true for you. If you don’t know already, you need to learn the source of the anger.
Honesty in Conversation
Our clumsiness in relationships may cause us to have difficulty fully representing ourselves in conversation, especially with women. There are two reasons for this: First, as noted earlier, we tend to protect women from our negative feelings. Secondly, because we generally believe women have better conversation skills than we do, we default to the position of minimal interaction as our (inadequate) defense. We emotionally shut down and minimally participate in the discussion. As you might expect, this can cause significant problems in close relationships.
Think about your last disagreement with your partner. How did it end?
With anger and hostility that seethed over a day or more?
With calm discussion about the issue and a mutually agreed-upon resolution?
With the issue being swept under the rug for the moment?
Unless it was successfully resolved, chances are it is still a “live issue” and is causing distance between you and your partner. Enough of these instances, and the distance is difficult to overcome, so we end up with jaded, joyless relationships or open hostility and resentment. Ideally, we want to live without expectations—as impossible as that sounds. But as my former pastor, Dr. Jody Seymour, says, “An expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.”
