5 Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage Communication Quickly

As a couples therapist and a relationship coach, I’m frequently asked “what are some simple, easy ways to quickly strengthen marriage communication?” That’s why I decided to create a little “cheat sheet” with five indispensable tips that I’ve picked up along the way.

Each of these, though simple, can help you create significant gains for your marriage communication as soon as you begin to implement them.

1. Understand The 5-to-1 Ratio

Your actions play an important role in your marriage communication—but sometimes we don’t understand the impact of our actions. According to relationship researcher John Gottman, for every one negative interaction, criticism, or correction between partners, there must be five positive interactions. Without the cushion of strong positive interactions, it’s unlikely that negative feedback will be met receptively by your partner.

There are many types of interactions that count toward the five. Of course, most people think of verbal expressions as the obvious way to connect. It’s true that a compliment, word of encouragement, or romantic proclamation is a powerful positive for your ratio count. However, there are other valuable ways to keep that ratio high throughout your busy day, such as these non-verbal communications:

A light touch or a simple hug.
A shared laugh or glance.
Listening with attunement and empathy.
Thoughtful gestures: pouring him a cup of coffee, picking up her dry cleaning.
Written words: a positive note or text

2. Recognize the Difference Between Intent and Impact

An aha moment for many clients of mine is when I explain the difference between intent and impact.

Impact is what someone feels as a consequence of your actions/words/behavior.
Intent is what you intended with your action/word/behavior.

In a relationship, when one partner is feeling hurt by the other one, typically, the intent is different from the impact. Most people make the mistake of immediately defending their intention when they see they have hurt someone.

This inadvertently invalidates the hurt person’s experience. It’s challenging to hear the ways in which you’ve hurt your spouse but one of the best ways to strengthen your marriage communication is to resist that urge to respond with intention.

Instead, try to honor and acknowledge the impact of your actions first by listening to their experience and validating. Then, later, when the time is right, you can provide your context. The appropriate time to share intention is always after the hurt person feels understood.

3. Speak From Your Primary Emotion, Not Secondary

Your initial emotional experience after feeling triggered by an interaction is considered a primary emotion. Very often, these emotions feel vulnerable and scary to communicate to someone else. Some examples:

Insecure
Rejected
Ashamed
Inadequate
Unlovable
Sad
Hurt
Scared

Because it’s so hard to sit in those emotions our bodies springboard us out of them by moving into secondary emotions which shield us from feeling pain. Examples of secondary emotions include:

Anger
Frustration
Resentment
Jealousy
Judgment

This process happens in mere moments, so fast in fact that much of the time, people are unaware of the primary emotion underlying the secondary emotion. To improve your marriage communication quickly, try this:

Focus on identifying the vulnerable “beneath” feelings the next time you feel activated emotionally and speak to your partner from that place. When you speak from your primary emotions you are more likely to be heard, validated, and have your needs met. You are less likely to experience escalation, tension, and distance.

4. Go To Bed Angry

Somehow, somewhere, the popular myth was generated that for a relationship to be healthy, partners should resolve their fights before they go to bed. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It may sound crazy to you, but if you want to improve your relationship communication quickly, give yourselves permission and space to go to bed angry.

Allow me to provide a dash of interpersonal neurobiology to help explain why this is the best decision for your relationship's well-being. When you and your partner begin to slide into a heated argument, your brain becomes emotionally flooded and the survival instincts take over. In this state, your thinking falls prey to all-or-nothing reasoning, negativity biases, and other cognitive distortions.

In other words, this is the worst possible state from which to try to solve a problem. In this activated state, all humans become, quite literally, more stupid. The brain’s only focus is scanning for threats and keeping you safe. It can take hours for the brain and nervous system to complete the stress cycle and put the thinking and reasoning brain center back in command.

The Power of the Pause When You’re Angry

A pause from the stimulus (your partner, the situation) is vital for the brain to regulate back to calm. Asking for a pause/respecting a partner’s request for a pause is hard in the moment. But when you do this intentional work, you are “growing beyond fighting or fleeing” as Alexandra Solomon writes in her book, Loving Bravely.

Conflict happens: it’s an inevitable part of being in a relationship with others. Taking a pause when temps are running high, even leaving an issue feeling unresolved overnight, is the very thing that will enable working through the conflict more successfully in the future.

5. Put Your Phone Away

The distractions of modern life are dizzying. We live in a time of constant access. Text, email, the news, the shopping cart, the social media worlds. We are tugged back to our phones relentlessly. Many people are implementing “quiet mode” as a means of reducing distractibility at work.

These types of guardrails help us be more productive professionally. But what are we doing to protect our focus in our relationships? Couples seldom treat their quality time together with the same intention or care as their focused work time.

A chronic couple complaint I hear in my practice is that one or both spouses are not present because they are on their phone(s). There’s even a word for it: “phubbing",” which is defined by the Oxford Language Dictionary as: the practice of ignoring one’s companion in order to pay attention to one’s phone or other mobile device.

The chronic invalidation that one or both experience by this “there but not there” phenomenon can frustrate each person’s attachment system and erode the relationship over time.

How to Disconnect to Connect

So, what can we do to prevent this disconnection between partners?

It's simple in theory and difficult in practice: if you want to quickly strengthen communication in your marriage, put your phone away. Away, away, away. Be proactive and treat time with your partner as you treat focused time at work.

Remember, your attention is the most precious gift you can give someone. The skillful management of attention makes you happier in your relationships, across the board.

Your Marriage Communication Can Be Saved

These relationship tips and strategies do take effort to implement. But once you’ve begun practicing some of these new habits, the results will reinforce the value of those efforts. Your spousal communication will feel infused with connection and understanding. It’s possible, I promise.