For a Successful Relationship You Need Skills

How important are skills in creating a successful marriage – or any committed couple relationship? Here is how important they are: If you were a city planner, you'd need problem-solving and decision-making skills. You'd need to create a vision for the future and plan for its realization. If you were a clergy person, you'd need listening skills, empathy and strong values.

To be an effective teacher, you'd have to communicate clearly and understand your students, especially how they learn. If you were a mediator, you'd need skills in conflict resolution, compromise and working toward agreement without blaming.

As a TV talk show host, you'd need interview skills and a genuine interest in people. To be an enlightened employer, you'd need to appreciate, encourage and support your employees. Working in the area of cross-cultural relations would require considerable skill in power sharing and managing diversity.

To create a successful marriage, you need all those skills – and more. You may not need any one of those skills as regularly or as intensively as you would if that skill were central to a particular occupation. But they would all be important, in the sense that the absence of any one could cause serious trouble sometime in the life of the relationship and the presence of them would greatly enrich your relationship.

Few people get married mindful of the relationship skills that success is going to require of them. Getting married is about friendship, security, the promise of regular good sex, being with the one you expect to love you as you've always wanted to be loved – any number of reasons. Seldom, however, is getting married about learning new skills and becoming a better person through their use.

Typically, if you were an engineer on a new job, by virtue of your training you would have a pretty clear idea of what doing your engineering job would demand. On the other hand, because you almost certainly had no prior training in the skills of marriage, you would not be thinking skills at all when you became someone's spouse and took on the "marriage job." On the other hand, you would probably discover those skills soon enough by their absence when you needed them.

Pick almost any couple in trouble. Find the area of their relationship where they regularly collide, where they anger, hurt and disappoint each other. Poke around a bit.

Underneath all their noise and thrashing about, you will almost certainly discover the absence of some skill – perhaps the ability to hear each other accurately or to stay focused during a discussion – that is the primary cause of this couple conflict – skills that, had they been present at the right moment, would have made the couple's distress unnecessary.

Because most couples do not think skills when problems arise, they tend to demonize each other instead. When Sally and Ted fight, Ted doesn't see the problem as a lack of skill - they don't know how to explore disagreements without insulting each other. In his view, Sally is an angry and unreasonable person, and he is the innocent victim who made a big mistake in marrying her.

How much better it would be if Ted and Sally – and all the other couples who antagonize and disappoint each other – could think deficient skills instead of deficient people. Taking the position that we're two decent and well-meaning people confronting a problem or situation that challenges us beyond our current ability – can, in itself, make all sorts of destructive labeling and blaming unnecessary.

Learning the skills that relationship succeed require, an often pleasant and enriching experience in itself, can have a strongly positive effect on the way partners see each other and, consequently, on their relationship. The husband who was "uncaring" when he didn't listen to his wife at the depth that she wanted, suddenly became sensitive empathic and when he learned to listen for personal meaning.

Improving relationships isn't a matter of changing personality or character (impossible tasks) but simply identifying the skills that are needed, learning and using them regularly. How to acquire the relationship skills you need for success will be explored in the next column.

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Copyright © 2005 Dr. David E. Sanford All rights reserved.
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