Talking about the weather, your plans for the week, or the local news is easy. However, these are not the kinds of conversations that nourish a marriage and make a couple grow. Rather, talking about ourselves, our desires, and our difficulties are opportunities to get to know each other better, to understand each other better and therefore to love each other better.
Marriage counselor Emmanuelle Bosvet told Aleteia that it is indeed vital for couples to take time to open up to each other, to reveal their needs, their deepest aspirations, and their emotions. Doing this says something real and true about yourself, and it’s necessary in order for married couples to grow in unity. “Through talking, we get closer to the mystery of the other, we become aware of their wishes, we discover pieces of their secret garden,” Bosvet said.
Moreover, taking regular “heart-to-heart” time with your spouse is an immense asset for your married life in the long term. No matter how close a couple is, they are bound to experience more or less tension when dealing with subjects as varied as the destination to choose for their next vacation, one of the two’s proven inability to tidy up, or even a case of infidelity. If a couple is used to talking in depth, to talking about themselves, to discussing intimate subjects, then they’ll be more prepared and able to communicate in times of crisis.
Without this ability, which is more easily acquired during periods of calm, spouses risk isolating themselves and cutting themselves off from all communication, which will only exacerbate the conflict. “Crises need to be faced together,” Pope Francis emphasizes in his encyclical Amoris Laetitia (paragraph 234). This is not always easy, “since persons sometimes withdraw in order to avoid saying what they feel; they retreat into a craven silence,” he notes. “At these times, it becomes all the more important to create opportunities for speaking heart to heart. Unless a couple learns to do this, they will find it harder and harder as time passes.”
“Communication is an art learned in moments of peace in order to be practiced in times of difficulty,” he goes on to say. This is why it’s particularly useful to learn right away to talk with our spouse about what’s really going on with us. It’s a way of anticipating the resolution of future conflicts, and consequently of reducing periods of silence in favor of greater conjugal harmony.
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