Stefanie Stahl is a best-selling author and psychotherapist, Lukas Klaschinski is a podcast star and psychologist – they write one together star-Column on topics of love, family and relationships. This time it’s about communication in the partnership.
By Stefanie Stahl and Lukas Klaschinski
Lukas Klaschinski: We take communication for granted. It is something that we are never explicitly taught and that can give rise to an incredible number of misunderstandings. Most of us communicate the way we have implicitly heard at home. The way we spoke in our parents’ house and among friends also shapes our communicative style later on. And sometimes it’s not that healthy. If we then have a partner who has been socialized completely differently and communicates differently, this can lead to problems.
Stefanie Stahl: And many people encounter these communication problems in their relationships. A study by the University of Göttingen from 2016 shows this very clearly. Over half of all participants reported problems in their relationships that had to do with communication. Especially when it came to conflict or expressing negative feelings and criticism. This means that communication behavior was the absolute most common problem in partnerships. So we see that verbal exchange is something incredibly important in relationships. In the end, communication is our best tool for managing conflict. I like to think of this sentence by psychotherapist Michael Lukas Moeller: “Happy couples differ from unhappy couples by the intensity of their conversations.”
Lukas Klaschinski: However, many couples only reflect on this when they have already lost their way. My recommendation would be to work on communication behavior when you’re actually having a good phase.