Hello Friends,
With our last blog, we started part one of a two-part series on communication in marriage. Communication is a gift. It allows us to connect with our spouses. However, because of several different variables, communication can also be very difficult. During part one, we gave you three ways to help improve your communication with your spouse. Click here to read it if you haven’t already. With this blog, we are going to dive a little deeper into ways that communication can be improved.
Conversational Culture
Your entire marriage is a never-ending, ever-evolving, and constantly flowing stream of dialogue.
Ryan Frederick
You may have never heard the phrase “Conversational Culture” before. I had not before reading See-Through Marriage by Ryan and Selena Frederick. Basically, your conversational culture the condition of your communication between you and your spouse.
- How often do you talk to your spouse?
- What are your typical topics of conversation?
- Do you laugh together often?
- Do you seek God together?
- What is the usual theme or the conversations? Angry, Joy, Frustration, Silly. or Serious
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions but by answering them you can determine if your “Conversational Culture” is healthy or needs some work.
Unfortunately, in most marriages, the conversational culture needs some work. Let’s talk about ways we can improve the culture of our marriage.
Changing the Culture
The foundation of a healthy conversational culture in marriage is mutual respect- respect is an expression of value, and valuing someone makes you curious about and desirous of them.
Ryan Frederick
If we are going to change our culture we have got to start with respect. We need to speak to our spouse in a way that shows them that we may not agree with them at that moment but we still love and respect them as our spouse. When respect is applied to our conversations other harmful things are eliminated. Name-calling, vulgar language, physical and verbal abuse, etc. By adding one thing, your communication can instantly improve. But let’s not stop there.
3 Ways to Change Your Conversational Culture
Establish an Intentional Baseline
All Scripture is God-breathed [given by divine inspiration] and is profitable for instruction, for conviction [of sin], for correction [of error and restoration to obedience], for training in righteousness [learning to live in conformity to God’s will, both publicly and privately—behaving honorably with personal integrity and moral courage] 2 Timothy 3:16
After we have decided to add respect to our conversations, the next step is to establish a baseline. According to Google, “A baseline is a benchmark that is used as a foundation for measuring or comparing current and past values.”
As Christians, our baseline is the Bible. Everything we do our say, in marriage and in life, should be measured against the Scripture. The Scripture gives us guidance and instruction on how to not only live our best lives but also how to have a great marriage.
Measure every word against the Word and your conversational culture will start to shift.
It’s immensely important for you, as a couple, to understand and agree on the authority of Scripture so intensely and so truly that it actually affects how you communicate with one another.
Ryan Frederick
Allow for Intentional Inquiry
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24
When we marry our spouses something amazing happens. The Lord joins us together. We become one. This connection is one of the most intimate connections we will have on this earth. With this connection comes transparency. We should be able to be open and honest with our spouses. We should be able to ask them intimate or even hard questions.
With this connection and transparency, there will also have to be lots of forgiveness and grace. We are here to help and encourage our spouses not to belittle them and bring them down.
This open and honest inquiry is for growth not for harm. Again we have a great responsibility in marriage to not only know our spouses but protect them and help them grow as well.
Intentional inquiry is basically an open-door policy for your heart and soul.
Ryan Frederick
Maintain Intentional Tone
In the same way, you husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way [with great gentleness and tact, and with an intelligent regard for the marriage relationship], as with someone physically weaker, since she is a woman. Show her honor and respect as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered or ineffective.1 Peter 3:7
The words we say do not carry as much weight as how we say them. You can be saying the exact right words in the exact wrong tone. Our body language and the tone of our voices factor in our communication in such a dynamic way.
To have a healthy conversational culture we should both focus on our tone and body language. We should use every facet we have to communicate in a clear and kind way.
Now, this is a hard one because in heated conversations it is easy to let our tone get the best of us. So during those times, we should not only be careful of our tone, but we need to look over the other person’s tone and try to maintain open and honest communication.
Remembering we added respect to our marriage will help with this. When we respect our spouses we will not want to demean them with harsh tones and words. The trick here is to extend grace and forgiveness. Change tone will be a process, not a one and done.
You and your spouse were made with value, worth, and importance hardwired into your very being. God has valued you, and therefore you can place immense value on one another.
Ryan Frederick
It’s a Life-Long Process
Communicating well and establishing a healthy conversational culture in your marriage will truly be something you work at for the rest of your life. But it will be worth every ounce of work you put into it. The more you grow in communication the more your marriage will grow as well. You will find a happy marriage comes with a healthy conversational culture.
You can do this!
We are praying for you!
For this and more information about communicating check out See-Through Marriage by Ryan and Selena Frederick.
For more resources on marriage check out A Beautiful Adventure Marriage: A Guide for the Marriage God Created for You.