Use Conflict Resolution to Save Your Marriage

In today’s day and age, we are increasingly challenged with conflicts in our daily life and especially in our marriage. In this article, we will explore a few ways to save your marriage by introducing some useful insights into conflict resolution.

The first and foremost concept to examine, within yourself and your spouse, is your expectations. Have you had a chance to really look into what your expectations are in your marriage? Do you know what they are? Do you think they are reasonable? You can easily surprise yourself with how easily a conflict has been resolved by simply examining your expectations and possibly adjusting them to be more realistic and reasonable.

A simple example of the above is when a spouse expects that their activities have to be done as a couple, e.g., shopping, going out, travel, social gatherings, etc. While this is certainly something meaningful, could this expectation be causing you grief? Are you having trouble with your spouse regarding issues related to this? Then you might want to further explore with the following questions: Is it reasonable for me to expect that? Is that the expectations for couples in my culture? Is that the expectation of my spouse? Does my spouse insist on the same, or do they look for opportunities to do things alone? This is a time for you to sit down and reflect. Remember, you can usually get to the right answer very quickly if you ask yourself empowering questions, instead of the other way around.

Even though one’s expectations are an aspect of communication, let’s explore the latter in more depth. The word communication is literally used everywhere nowadays, and more often than not, poor communication is usually the cause almost all grief. Even if both partners in the marriage have different opinions about something, with the right communication between them, they can simply and respectfully agree to disagree.

To explore this further, experts say that 90% of communication is non-verbal, to which a smaller portion of that goes to your voice intonations and pace, but the major portion of it goes to your beliefs and what goes on in your mind. I bet you weren’t expecting any of this were you?

Let look at an example of how the non-verbal aspect of communication can influence a situation with the same words being said. In the first example, a husband gives his wife a bunch of flowers, with the pure intention that he loved this woman so much, he thought what better way to express this love than with flowers? With no other expectations, conditions, requirements, other than just loving, and the husband hands over this bunch and says: “Just because I love you”. How do you think a wife would respond to that?

On the other hand, a husband gives his wife a bunch of flowers, but he has a different intention, even though it is true that he loves her, but he also wants to get something for himself and wants to soften her up, and expects something in return for these flowers, and as he hands over the flowers he says: “Just because I love you”. Can you feel the difference between the two?

The examples above, show you that by making simple adjustments between you and yourself, you can dramatically improve the outcomes of your efforts to solve disagreements, and by engaging respect, and open mind, and a willingness to grow together, you’ll be surprised which how deep your love for one another can get, simply by overcoming obstacles, which are really opportunities to grow and expand beyond your current comfort zone to experience higher levels of marital ecstasy.