The Hard Conversation
You've Been Putting Off

There's a subject in your house with dust on it. It came up once, maybe twice, and it went badly enough or awkwardly enough that neither of you has raised it since. You both know its shape. You can feel a conversation drifting toward it, and you can feel the two of you agree, without a word about it, to steer it somewhere else.

I'm not going to guess what yours is, and I don't need to. The deferring has its own costs, separate from whatever the subject is, and the deferring is the part you can do something about this week.

What Avoiding One Subject Costs You Every Week

Leaving it alone doesn't keep it where it is.

You edit around it. Ordinary sentences get checked before they leave your mouth, because a good number of them have a route into it. That's a small tax on every conversation you two do have, including the ones you're enjoying.

The subjects next to it go off limits too. If the deferred one is money, her car needing tires is now loaded. If it's her mother, so is Thanksgiving. You keep adding to the list, because neither of you wants to be the one who wandered in.

And you keep running your account of it in your head, month after month, with nobody there to tell you where you've got it wrong. By now you're not arguing with her. You're arguing with a version of her you built.

In The Next Conversation, Jefferson Fisher explains that a reaction wildly out of proportion to what triggered it usually means a conversation you were never invited to is running in the other person's head. So when a remark about the calendar gets an answer three sizes too big, that's information rather than an ambush. She's got one of those running too.

There's one more cost that has nothing to do with talking. When a topic is off limits, unplanned evenings get harder, because empty time is where it might come up. So you fill them with television, and both of you know why it's on. That's part of why Date Nights Dancing is built the way it is: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working on the same thing. An evening with something in it besides open air is easier to say yes to when there's a topic the two of you keep routing around.

Not Everything You're Deferring Is A Debt

Before you schedule anything, sort what you've got. Deferred subjects come in two kinds, and each one needs a different conversation.

1. A decision waiting on a talk: there's an outcome available. Somebody takes the job or doesn't. The money goes here or it goes there. You go to the thing in April or you skip it. These can close, and the conversation ends with something written on the calendar. If yours is the money version, that one has its own terrain, and I've written about how to talk about money with your wife separately.

2. A difference the two of you are going to have for the rest of your lives: she's social and you're not. You want to be near your family and she wants distance from hers. One of you spends easy and one of you counts. There's no decision at the end of this one, which is exactly why it went badly the first time: you both went in hunting for a verdict on a difference that doesn't have one. I've written about the difference between the arguments that can close and the ones that can't in why old arguments keep coming back, and it's worth knowing which one you've got before you open your mouth.

The sort changes what you're opening. For the first kind, you're opening a decision. For the second, you're opening a description: this is what it costs me, this is what it costs you, and this is how we live next to it without it going underground for another year.

A difference like that isn't something either of you owes the other. It's a condition of the marriage you haven't described to each other yet.

Open With What You Want And How You Want It To End

In the same book, Fisher gives the frame in three parts: say exactly what you want to talk about, say how you want it to end, and get her agreement to go there with you. He's firm that you set it at the start, not after something goes sideways.

"We need to talk" does none of those. It names no subject, promises no ending, and asks nothing. It's a summons, so she braces, and the bracing is what you were both avoiding.

If you want to try it, you might say something like this: There's something I've been sitting on for a while and I want to bring it up. I'm not trying to settle it tonight. I mostly want to hear how you're seeing it. Can we do that this week?

Say it in the truck first, to nobody, before you say it to her. It should sound like you and not like a script, so change the words until it does.

She knows the subject is coming. She knows what ending you're after. She got asked instead of told. A lot of what makes a person go rigid at the front of a hard conversation is not knowing where it's headed, and four sentences take that off the table.

One subject, by the way. Not the tour. Every extra thing you pile on cuts the odds that any of it goes anywhere, and if a second one shows up mid-conversation, Fisher's answer is to acknowledge it and hold: that's worth talking about too, and let's stay on one thing at a time.

Put The Talk Where Something Else Is Already Happening

An empty room, two chairs, one agenda item, and nothing to do with your hands is the hardest possible venue. Side by side beats face to face for this. Having somewhere to look that isn't her face gives your pauses a place to go.

One of the ideas I send out in The Spark is the Driveway Conversation. You pull in, and instead of going straight inside, the two of you stay in the car for ten minutes and talk. In a car you're shoulder to shoulder, so nobody has to hold eye contact through the hard part. There's a windshield to look at while you find your next sentence. And it ends on its own, because eventually you go inside, so the conversation can't sprawl into a summit.

The same is true of anything with a task in it. Dishes. A walk the dog needed anyway. A fifteen-minute lesson in the living room, where there are moves to get right and something to laugh about, which is one more reason the Date Nights Dancing program turns into talking afterward more often than an evening set aside for talking does. Whatever gets said at the sink was never the assignment. That's usually why it gets said.

If you don't have a regular slot like this, the sturdiest version of it is a standing date night that carries your talking, and there are more shapes for it in my ideas and inspiration library.

The First Conversation Doesn't Have To Fix Anything

Fisher's way of putting it: you'll get blind acceptance of your point of view zero times out of ten, and a better understanding of hers nine times out of ten. Set the goal you can reach. The first pass at a shelved subject is for understanding, not for resolution, and going in for resolution is what made it unopenable in the first place.

Which means most of your job in there is receiving. In I Hear You, Michael S. Sorensen describes validation as two parts: name the specific emotion, then give a reason it makes sense to feel it. Not agreement. You can do this while disagreeing with every word, because you're validating the feeling, not the claim.

It might sound like: I get why you'd be frustrated about it. You brought it up twice and both times I changed the subject.

Sorensen also names the temptation nearly everybody loses to, which is jumping straight to advice or reassurance. His fix is to ask first: I have a few thoughts, may I share them? That question reads formal on the page. Spoken, it's just "you want my take, or you want me to listen?"

If what comes back is about you, the order still holds. Hear it out, name what she's feeling, say why that makes sense, and then say your part. If she goes the other direction and shuts down instead, that's a different pattern with a different response, and I've written about what to do when your spouse shuts down during conflict.

Then end it before it runs out of air. Something like that's probably enough for tonight, and I'm glad we finally opened it is a real ending, not a cop-out. Sorensen ends with one more validation on the way out, and thanking her for going there with you covers it.

Nothing has to be decided. You reopened a topic neither of you had touched in months, both of you came out the other side of it, and it can come up again next week without either of you flinching.

Say The First Sentence This Week

Pick the night. Pick the place: the driveway, the sink, the block around the neighborhood, the living room floor.

Say your four sentences, then let her talk longer than you do.

If what you're deferring is bigger than a conversation, something with an affair or an addiction or a safety question in it, that belongs with a counselor rather than a driveway. Saying so is the same first sentence pointed at a different room.

You're probably not deferring because you stopped caring. You're deferring because you care about how it comes out, and there's no controlling that. Which is a reasonable thing to be afraid of and a terrible reason to give it another year. You already know exactly which subject it is, and you've been turning it over for months. She doesn't know you're ready to open it.

One sentence this week, and the subject you've both been walking around is back on the table, where the two of you can do something with it.