Understanding Communication Through a Different Lens

Learning new information about what relationships are and are not will help you express yourself in ways you never thought possible.

Revolutionizing your understanding about topics, such as intimacy, commitment, love, and sex is the only way to change your communication about your needs, wants, desires, and dreams. This knowledge about yourself will provide you with the answers to your question, “How to save my relationship?”

If you want to change your communication, which encompasses thoughts, words and deeds, you can only do so by understanding your relationship through a different lens. If you can’t understand your relationship right now, you’re looking through a lens that is not helping you. By changing your lens, you’ll be able to stimulate your creative imagination to get unstuck and learn how to save a relationship that’s worthwhile saving.

Here’s a mundane example: When my husband doesn’t put on a new roll of toilet paper after he’s used the last square, I used to get upset. You’d think that after decades of marriage, I’d be used to it, but sometimes it drove me crazy. Why? I used to find it disrespectful of me. I’d become indignant. Now I don’t take it personally; he just forgot or didn’t have time.

My lens, my viewpoint changed because of the new meaning, the new definition that I now give to a behavior that bothered me. Does it mean that I’m the one who always installs a new TP roll? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Sometimes I’m too busy, too rushed to spend the extra 30 seconds either, just like my husband. I can’t honestly say that I never ever get annoyed, but it’s much less often.

New understanding from another vantage point teaches you how to save your relationship.

Cathy Thorne’s marriage cartoon captures relationships at their peaks and their valleys. Her cartoons give us that much-needed humorous viewpoint to help us survive and thrive in our marriages.

Leave a comment below about one of your pet peeves and how you changed your perspective without having to say anything to your partner. How long did it take you to make this internal shift?