The conversation is commonly held to lie at the heart of a thriving partnership. But our culture often has a skewed picture of what this might involve.

We tend to adopt a Romantic attitude, which holds that partners ideally understand one another intuitively and see good conversation as free-flowing and spontaneous.

It would feel cold and stilted to introduce rules, to resort to a manual or to take a class on ‘how to speak to your partner’.

But the fact is, it is very normal to struggle in this area.

We often end up sitting in glum silence, skirt round tricky things or get into rows when difficult issues are at stake.

A particularly poignant sign of the trouble we have with talking in relationships is the tendency to sulk.

At heart, sulking combines intense anger with an intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about: one both desperately wants to be understood and yet is utterly committed to not explaining oneself plainly.

It happens a lot, and it’s telling us that, far from being easy and natural, good discussion in a relationship can be very hard to manage.

Good communication means the capacity to give another person an accurate picture of what is happening in our emotional and psychological lives — and in particular,

the capacity to describe our very darkest, trickiest and most awkward sides in such a way that others can understand and even sympathise with us.

The good communicator has the skill to take their beloved, in a timely, reassuring and gentle way,

without melodrama or fury, into some of the trickiest areas of their personality and warn them of what is there (like a tour guide to a disaster zone),

explaining what is problematic in such a way that the beloved will not be terrified, can come to understand,

can be prepared and may perhaps forgive and accept.

We’re not naturally skilled at these kinds of conversations because there is so much inside of us that we can’t face up to,

feel ashamed of or can’t quite understand —and we are therefore in no position to present our depths sanely to an observer whose affections we want to maintain.

Perhaps you have completely wasted the day on the internet.

Or you are feeling sexually restless and drawn to someone else.

Or you are in a vortex of envy for a colleague who seems to be getting everything right at work.

Or you’re feeling overwhelmed by regret and self-hatred for some silly decisions you took last year (because you crave applause).

Ir maybe it’s a terror of the future that has rendered you mute: everything is going to go wrong. It’s over.

You had one life — and you blew it. There are things inside of us that are simply so awful, and therefore so undigested, that we cannot —

day-to-day —lay them out before our partners in a way that they can grasp them calmly and generously.

It is no insult to a relationship to realise that there’s a shortfall of mutual eloquence and that this will probably require some level of artificiality.

Our need for assistance is often especially acute around anger, desires that seem strange and the need for reassurance (which tends to arise when one feels one doesn’t especially deserve it).

We should not feel that we are failures, dull-witted, unimaginative or unsophisticated if we recognise a need to learn how to talk to our partners with premeditation and conscious purpose. We are simply emerging from a Romantic prejudice against doing so.

An artificial conversation can sound like quite a strange idea.

But what it involves is deliberately setting an agenda and putting a few useful moves and rules into practice. Over dinner with a partner, we might

—for example — work our way gradually yet systematically through a list of difficult but important questions that we’d otherwise likely shelve or not find our way to —

What would you most like to be complimented on in the relationship? —

Where do you think you’re especially good as a person? — Which of your flaws do you want to be

treated more generously?

– What would you tell your younger self about love?

– What do you think I get wrong about you?

– What is one incident you’d like me to apologise for?

– Can I ask you to apologise for an incident too?
– How have I let you down?

– What would you want to change about
me?
– If I was magically offered a chance to change something about you, what do you guess it would be?

– If you could write an instruction manual for yourself in bed, what would you put in it?

(Both take a piece of paper and write down three new things you would like to try around sex.

Then exchange drafts).

Another thing we can do with a partner is to finish these sentence stems about our feelings towards one another

– the idea is to finish them very fast without thinking too hard.

What emerges isn’t, of course, a final statement. But it helps to get awkward material into the light of day so that it can be examined properly.

I resent …

I am puzzled by …

I am hurt by …

I regret …

I am afraid that …

I am frustrated by …

I am happier when …

I want …

I appreciate it…

I hope …

I would so like you to understand …

Part of the artifice here is to agree in advance not to be offended by what the other says, though some of what comes up are bound to be at the very least disconcerting.

The idea is to set up an occasion on which for once it is possible to look carefully at genuinely awkward aspects of what’s going on in the couple.

The helpful background assumption is that we can’t have a close relationship without there being a lot of sore spots on both sides.

We’re not (for a bit) going to be angry with one another. We’re going to try to get to know what’s happening.

We might also try out an exercise of fleshing out some sequences:

When I am anxious in our relationship, I tend to …

You tend to respond by …,

which makes me …

When we argue, on the surface I show …,

but inside I feel …

The more I …,

the more you …,

and then the more I …

We’re trying to identify repeated sequences of emotions, not to validate or condemn them but to understand.

The premise of this artificial conversation is that (for the duration of the conversation) no one is held to blame. We’re just learning to notice some problems with how we interact.

Relationships founder on our inability
to make ourselves known, forgiven and accepted for who

we are. We shouldn’t work with the assumption that if we have a row over these questions, the opportunity has been wasted.

We need to be able to say certain painful things in order to recover an ability to be affectionate and trusting.

That is all part of the particular wisdom and task of regularly having more artificial, structured and uncensored conversations.