By Víctor Silva and Marcela Gómez
It is two in the morning. You have been talking for hours, each of you knows the other person’s reasons, and tomorrow the same decision will still be pending. As the conversation ends, a promise appears: “We need to talk more.” Maybe you do. Maybe what is missing is no longer another explanation.
Talking more does not always improve relationship communication because conversations can serve very different purposes. Understanding, asking, negotiating, deciding, and acting are not the same thing. A conversation can be long and honest without producing the agreement expected from it. Before adding more time, it helps to know what work you are trying to do and what response would allow you to recognize that it has been done.
Understanding something is not the same as accepting it
“Now I understand why you do it” can be an important step forward. It allows you to hear an experience that you had previously judged from the outside. But it does not mean “I agree that this should continue,” “it no longer affects me,” or “we have decided what to do.”
A couple may understand perfectly why each person wants to live in a different city. That understanding does not choose where to live. Continuing to explore the reasons may add nuance; it does not replace negotiation or remove a difference that may carry a cost for both people.
When an explanation is expected to produce acceptance, every refusal can look like proof that the matter has not yet been explained well enough. The conversation gets trapped in an impossible task: making understanding require agreement.
In Ancestrina’s conceptual approach, understanding has value in its own right, but it should not be confused with transformation. Sometimes what has been understood makes the disagreement that still needs to be addressed even clearer.
Not every conversation is trying to do the same thing
There is a difference between saying, “I want to tell you how I experienced this,” and “I want us to agree on how to handle it next time.” If one person needs to be received and the other begins offering solutions, both may end up frustrated even when neither words nor interest are missing.
You may also begin by wanting to inform your partner and discover that you were expecting permission. Or you may present a decision as though it were still open for consultation. Recognizing this does not mean searching for a hidden intention behind every sentence. It means stating more honestly what kind of participation you are asking for.
Informing and asking
“I have decided to accept that job” communicates a decision. “I am considering accepting it, and I want to look with you at how it would affect us” opens a different conversation. Calling a decision that has already been made a dialogue can create an expectation of influence that does not actually exist.
A request, on the other hand, asks for something the other person can accept or decline. If the only possible outcome is yes, it is better to recognize the demand than to hide it inside a polite question. Courteous wording does not make something negotiable when you are not willing to negotiate it.
Negotiating and deciding
Negotiation requires the possibility of changing something in the proposal. Repeating the same arguments until one person gives in does not demonstrate that a shared solution has appeared.
Deciding means taking on an option and its consequences. It may come after understanding and negotiation, but it does not emerge automatically from either one. If you need to choose and keep returning to how each of you feels, perhaps you are asking the conversation to remove the cost of choosing.
Unloading and persuading
Talking in order to unburden yourself is not illegitimate. It matters that the other person knows what role you are asking them to take and can say whether they are available. Accompanying someone through a difficult moment is not the same as becoming the required recipient of an emotional discharge that allows no limit.
Persuasion is not always a problem either: you can offer reasons and listen to objections. The difficulty appears when every objection serves only to prepare the next argument and the other person’s will no longer counts as a response.
The criterion for ending the conversation may reveal its real purpose
Ask what would need to happen for you to end this conversation without feeling that it was left incomplete. If the answer is “that I can explain my concern and hear theirs,” there is a possible task. If it is “that they finally admit I was right,” you are waiting for a specific response that you cannot produce on your own.
This does not mean giving up on repair or accepting any version of events. It means distinguishing what you can express from what requires another person’s voluntary participation.
Sometimes a sufficient ending would be to recognize that there is no agreement and define what comes next. Or to acknowledge that specific information is still missing. A conversation does not need to resolve the entire relationship in order to have served a purpose.
The Ancestrina video accompanying this reflection addresses the difference between talking a lot and understanding each other. It can help you observe what you are asking your conversations to accomplish, without using it as evidence against your partner.
When explaining replaces what you had agreed to do
“I know why I did not do it.” The explanation may be relevant. It does not complete the pending task or decide what will happen next time. If every broken agreement leads to another deep conversation and none of them changes everyday life, depth may be taking the place of a practical response.
For example, talking about the exhaustion that makes organizing the home difficult may help you reconsider an unfair distribution of responsibilities. If the result is always understanding that exhaustion while the same person continues doing everything, you still need to look at what is being sustained after the conversation.
This is not about replacing listening with productivity. Some conversations need time because something important has not yet been said. It is about not judging every conversation by its emotional intensity, as though feeling close for one night proved that an agreement already exists for the next day.
What the research allows us to say—and what it does not
A longitudinal study by Lavner and colleagues examined communication and satisfaction among newly married couples. Its findings do not support a simple one-way relationship. It does not show that conversation is useless or that talking a great deal harms a relationship.
The argument of this article is narrower and conceptual: counting hours of conversation does not tell us whether something was communicated, understood, requested, or agreed upon. To see that, we need to examine what happened during the conversation and what happened afterward.
A different conversation may begin by naming its task
“Today I do not need us to resolve this; I want to tell you what happened to me.” “I already know your reasons; I need to know whether we are going to change the agreement.” “I think we both understand it and still want different things.” These are different beginnings because they do not ask for the same kind of work.
Naming the task does not prevent every frustration. It may even make a no more visible when it had previously remained hidden among explanations. But it allows you to respond to that no instead of continuing to wait for more words to transform it on their own.
If your conversations often end with “we agreed to try,” the next question is Why Do So Many Relationship Agreements Change Nothing? It helps to know whether there was a decision made by both people, an expectation, or simply relief that the argument had ended.
Sources and scope of the references
- Lavner, J. A., Karney, B. R., and Bradbury, T. N. (2016). Does Couples’ Communication Predict Marital Satisfaction, or Does Marital Satisfaction Predict Communication? Journal of Marriage and Family, 78(3), 680–694. Reference. Observational evidence: Association between communication and satisfaction; longitudinal relationships were less robust. It does not show that talking more is harmful.
