Communicating Effectively in your Relationship | Part 1

Learning What You’re Feeling and How to Talk About It

This is the first in a series of posts about communicating in your relationship. We’ll be posting these often so keep checking back for the latest instalment. You might also consider attending our workshop on couple communication in February 2026. Learn more about that on our Landmark Learning Sessions page.

Did you ever stop to think about what communication actually is? When you consider what you’re trying to do when you communicate with someone, it becomes really clear why communication is so hard.

What you’re trying to do is take something in your brain — like thoughts or feelings — and transform them into words from your vocabulary, string them together into sentences, while hoping that the words you chose mean the same thing to the person on the receiving end of what you’re trying to share, and trying to avoid words that might take away from the meaning of what you’re trying to communicate.

For example, if I’m trying to tell you how much I enjoyed the pasta dish you made for me, I might say, “Wow! That was really incredible. The flavours in that dish were so interesting and different. But it was rich and delicious. I’d love to have it again sometime — and you should add a little more salt.”

What stands out?

Maybe you come away thinking that I really liked the dish.

Maybe your brain picked up on some of the ambiguous words that I used, like “interesting” and “different” — they’re not necessarily good or bad. But if you were going for some traditional flavours, you might feel insulted that I couched my review in words that took away from that.

Or maybe you heard the “you should add a little more salt” comment and felt like I was criticizing your cooking, and you might feel the need to defend the amount of salt you used.

Communicating effectively is hard. There are so many ways that the words we choose fail to fully represent the thoughts or feelings that we experience.

When I work with couples, I will often tell them a couple of things. First, the way you communicate with your partner has to look different from how you communicate with just about anyone else on the planet. Second, unless you grew up in the perfect family, the way you should be communicating with your partner was never taught to you — and it’s OK to be learning how to do it for the first time as an adult.

As an example of this, I used to work with a lot of people in the financial industry. When we would meet, I’d ask them to think about conversations they would have in executive boardrooms while looking at financial projections and spreadsheets. Then I’d ask how many times they would interject something about how they were feeling.

“Never!” was usually the response.

In that type of setting — as with most workplaces — your feelings are pretty irrelevant. In financial conversations, you’re looking at the black and the red and determining what decisions need to be made to increase the black and reduce the red on the next quarter’s spreadsheet.

The truth is that in the vast majority of our relationships, feelings matter relatively little. They should matter more, and they do matter more as relationships get closer, but in general we have very little experience communicating both our thinking about something and our feelings.

Learning to Talk About Your Feelings

The things that matter in your life — the things that keep you connected in your relationships — all matter because of feelings. And so, my two golden rules in relationships are that you should care about how your partner feels, and you should expect your partner to care about how you feel. If you can nail those two things, you’re well on your way.

But first, you actually have to know how you feel about something. And for that, you need to be specific.

Here’s another example. Imagine we’re in a relationship and I tell you that I’m sad about something. I’m guessing you probably don’t want me to be sad and might even be wondering if there’s anything you can do to help me move through it. Part of the problem is that the word I chose to represent my feeling (the word sad) is too general. There’s no way to know what might be helpful in that situation.

What would be helpful is for me to be more aware of what I’m actually feeling and to be more specific in what I’m communicating.

What if, instead of choosing the word sad, I was able to be more specific and tell you that I was feeling discouraged, or feeling lonely? Now we’ve got somewhere to go, right?

Because I know more accurately what I’m feeling, I can let you know that I’m discouraged and that what might be helpful is to hear something encouraging. Or, if I can recognize that I’m feeling lonely, I may be able to ask for some time together — like a date night or a weekend away.

When I learn to recognize what I’m feeling, I can also be more aware of what I might be needing from our relationship, and you’ll have more clarity too about what might be helpful moving forward.

But What If I’m Feeling Something Toward You?

What if I’m annoyed at you for something you did? What if you stayed later at work than you said you would, and I had supper prepared and on the table — but no one to eat it with?

When you come home, I might yell and scream something like, “There you go again. I can’t believe you’d do something like that. You never call when you’re going to be late! I can’t stand it when you do that!”

What do you think happens in that situation?

More often than not, you would respond defensively. “What are you talking about? I had no idea you were going to have supper ready! It’s not like you have supper ready every day. And I did call last week when I was going to be late — it’s not like I never call!”

Welcome to the world of criticism and defensiveness.

Criticism and defensiveness (along with stonewalling and contempt) make up what Dr. John Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” These are four toxic communication patterns that are poison to relationships. We should try to avoid them at all costs (even though we’re not always effective at that!).

What if, instead of yelling and screaming, I said, “Can I share something with you? I was really excited about cooking tonight, and when you were late I felt really disappointed and like I wasted my time. It’s really important to me that you call if you’re going to be later than you expect, because that helps me know you’re thinking about me.”

When I invite you to care about how I feel — rather than pummeling you with criticism — it’s far more likely that you’ll want to connect and repair, rather than feel the need to defend yourself against a barrage of allegations and insults.

This isn’t easy. That’s why I say that communicating effectively with your partner is a learned skill, rather than something that comes naturally.

There’s a lot more to share about this, including the other two of the Four Horsemen. The good news is that there are antidotes to each of them — and we’ll talk more about those next time.