How to Communicate Your Needs in a Relationship

07 Oct How to Communicate Your Needs in a Relationship

You have wanted him to call on Sunday evenings for about four months. You have not said so, because it seems like a small thing to make a point of, and because asking for it would make it count less if he then did it.

Both of those reasons are extremely common and neither survives examination.

Why this is harder after a long marriage

People dating in their fifties and sixties are often worse at this than they were at twenty-five, and there are reasons that have nothing to do with confidence.

A long marriage removes the need to ask. After fifteen years someone knows how you take your coffee and when you are upset. The skill of putting a need into words atrophies, because the situation stopped requiring it.

Years of unsuccessful asking teaches people to stop. If the last decade of a marriage involved raising the same thing repeatedly without result, the lesson learned was that raising things does not work. That lesson is accurate about the marriage and wrong about everyone else.

Early dating rewards being easy. Nobody wants to be the person with requirements in month two, so requirements get postponed, and by the time it feels safe to mention them they have been unspoken so long that raising one feels like an accusation.

The quiet cost of not asking

It is worth being concrete about what this costs, because the alternative to asking is rarely nothing.

Pew Research Center found that married adults were noticeably more likely than cohabiting adults to say they were very satisfied with how well they and their partner communicate, at 43% against 35%. What is striking is less the gap than the ceiling. Fewer than half of married people are very satisfied with how they communicate. This is a widespread difficulty rather than a personal defect.

An unasked need does not stay neutral. It becomes a quiet tally, and the tally gets presented eventually, usually at volume and usually about something unrelated.

The shape of a request that works

Four components. The order matters less than the presence of all four.

Name the thing, not the pattern

“I would like to speak on Sunday evenings” is actionable. “I wish you were more consistent” is a verdict, and verdicts get defended against rather than acted on.

The more specific the request, the easier it is to say yes to, and the easier it is to tell whether anything changed.

Say it is a preference, if it is

Most needs are preferences rather than conditions, and saying so takes the threat out of the sentence. “This would matter to me” invites a yes. “I need this” sounds like the opening of a negotiation neither of you wanted.

Reserve the stronger phrasing for the small number of things that genuinely are conditions. Which things those are for you is worth knowing in advance, and is the subject of our note on values in a relationship.

Leave out the justification

The instinct is to explain why the need is reasonable, usually with reference to a previous relationship. It weakens the request and it invites a debate about whether the reason is good enough.

You are allowed to want something because you want it. “I would like” is a complete sentence and lands better than a paragraph.

Ask at a neutral moment

Not during the disappointment. A request made ten minutes after the Sunday he did not call is heard as a complaint, however carefully it is phrased.

The same words on a Wednesday, unprompted, are heard as information.

What his answer tells you

This is the part most people overlook. The request is not only an attempt to get something. It is a test of how the relationship handles being asked, and the result is informative whichever way it goes.

Yes, and it then happens. The useful outcome, obviously.

A reasonable no. “Sundays are difficult because of the children, could we do Thursdays” is an entirely good answer. Someone who can decline your request and offer an alternative is easy to be in a relationship with.

Yes, and then nothing. The most common and the most informative. Agreement with no change usually means the request was heard as a complaint to be ended rather than a thing to be done. Worth raising exactly once more, plainly.

Offence. If a specific, mild, well-timed request produces hurt rather than an answer, you have learned something significant early and cheaply, and it is worth weighing against the other things you know, as we set out in our note on green flags in dating.

Frequently asked questions

Is it too early to ask for something in month two?

No, provided it is proportionate to month two. Asking for a regular phone call is fine. Asking him to change how he spends Christmas is not, yet. The scale of the request should match the scale of the relationship.

Does asking for it ruin it?

This is the belief that keeps most things unsaid, and it does not hold. What people actually value is being told what matters to someone. The version where he works it out unprompted is a nice story and a poor plan.

What if I do not know what I need?

Very common after a long marriage. Work backwards from irritation: the small recurring annoyance usually has a want underneath it, and naming the want is easier than defending the irritation.

He says I am being needy. What then?

Check the request was specific and proportionate. If it was, then the word is doing work that the argument could not, and that is worth noticing. A reasonable person responds to a reasonable request with yes, no, or a counter-offer.

How many times should I raise the same thing?

Twice. Once in case it was genuinely forgotten, once plainly with the observation that it did not change. A third time converts you into the person who nags, and by then you have the answer anyway.

Starting where the basics already match

Some of what gets asked for in month four is really a mismatch that was present on day one: how often two people want contact, how much time together they expect, how they each handle being asked for something. Those are knowable in advance and are part of what a consultation covers, which is the difference between a relationship where requests are small adjustments and one where every request is a negotiation. If you would rather start from the first kind, you can apply for a consultation.