“What can I do to communicate with you better?”
This is the question my husband asked me and caught me totally by surprise. I guess you would have to understand our history. We were the clash of the titans. Two graduate level professionals, each brilliant in our own right. He demanded I listen to him. I demanded he listen to me. We both deteriorated into frustration, refusing to bend for one another.
Until yesterday.
It was the perfect setup for a clash. I have been deep in legal research for a training event. The legal issues and nuances were fascinating to me. In my excitement, I began sharing my insights—as a lawyer—with my non-lawyer husband. Of course, I expected him to respect what I was saying from the vantage of a trained legal professional. But like I said: He is brilliant in his own right. He has been keeping himself informed, formulating his own opinions. But the way he was superimposing his opinions to drown out my legal analysis was enough to make me scream.
So I did what I never did in past clashes…
I yielded.
I let him have it. Let him dominate the floor. Why? Because I had nothing to prove. My excitement was clearly a matter of enlightenment, not contest. So if he needed to take the floor and run with it—so be it.
I admit that at that moment, it was frustrating. He was demanding that I substantiate the conclusions I made. I imagine that’s what a basketball player feels like when he’s driving into the paint for a guaranteed layup when his defender steals the ball.
Okay, brother, you stole the ball. Now you can enjoy playing by yourself.
Essentially, that is what my response resulted in. He stepped away for a few minutes to gather his thoughts. And when he came back, he invited me to play ball again. I was a little reluctant, had to fight the urge to punish him with silence. But I reengaged.
During his break, I found facts to substantiate my position. I established a foundation for my opinion. “I’m neutral,” I reminded him. “I’m not a fear-monger,” I gently, yet firmly insisted. His ball-steal earlier was to silence sensationalism of the facts. That was the furthest thing from my mind, and the last motivation I have whenever I’m simply sharing knowledge with others.
It was sobering for him.
I offered the evidence from a restatement of who I am. I’m not political. I’m not interested in making you afraid. I’m only making observations here. And when I reframed my analysis from that space, he, too, was deeply troubled by my analysis. From there, we continued to reason things out, speculate, and resolved our little kerfuffle.
So that was why I was surprised when he asked later in the evening, “what can I do to communicate better with you?” For nearly two decades, I secretly longed for this question. I used to demand it from him, arm wrestling for it. But he wasn’t giving it to me that way. It wasn’t until I yielded--refusing to assert my dominance as the legal mind in the room—that he invited me to “dominate in the paint” of my lane as a legal mind.
As I reveal in 5 Steps to Convert Conflict Into Connection, fear is the #1 obstacle, or trigger that, depending on how we respond to it, results in distance or connection. This weekend we found connection. I did not realize that my initial attempt to share legal analysis triggered my husband’s fears. He was simply trying to shut me down to keep himself calm. But when I responded from a place of gentleness, we were able to face that fear together. And finally, after 18 years of longing, this simple act of connection paid out dividends.
If you are a husband reading this post, I want you to know the power of this question. Your wife may be tempted to yell at you in response. You can handle it. Asking your wife how you can be a better husband in communication is a powerful leadership position. Your introspection inspires her to be introspective. If your wife is in chronic pain as a result of your cycles of conflict, she will not have the bandwidth to offer accountability or introspection at first. You can handle it.
When my husband asked this question, I did not respond right away. I thought about it. Really considered it. And my response offered him the opportunity to not only respond with more awareness, but to study me to find the positive patterns of female subtilty that he never noticed in the past.
And this is what makes converting conflict into connection challenging and rewarding.
If you are a wife reading this, I offer a challenge for you. If you are 100% honest, you desire your husband to lead. You resent him when he seeks to control or dominate. But you also resent him and lose respect for him when he fails to lead. What can you do differently when conflict arises between you and your Honey Bear? How can you yield so that he does not feel threatened by you when you are clearly in your lane?
Until we fight again,
Char
This post is 100% human-generated and is not a product of Ai.
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