I work with some of the brightest minds worldwide, yet this skill is not front of mind or understood and so their marriages begin to suffer and they don’t know why.
What’s interesting is this skill is not required at the start of a couples life together.
BUT it becomes increasingly more critical as the years progress which is why couples can start to struggle.
The skill that makes a relationship so impossible to be in is a lack of understanding of how your partner experiences their emotional world.
What do they need to experience that brings out the best in them and helps them keep their attraction for you alive?
This is so important to know because you cannot positively influence someone if you don’t understand their emotional world and how it works.
The cost of not understanding this critical influencing information is couples end up triggering each other negatively.
Some people can keep creating negative triggers in their partner without meaning to due to this lack of understanding.
In addition, this practice starts a process of emotional destruction as the person can feel misunderstood, uncared for and alone.
Not connecting to a partners’ emotional world affects trust, which is foundational for their ability to grow their connection.
So what emotions is your partner trying to get to any why?
In every situation, that answer can change, and to answer it, you cannot use your own thinking and needs because you are very different to your partner.
There is no question that without understanding this part of relationship-building, it is a challenge.
This is why people have an affair because this understanding is not needed at the start, so the initial connection is easy.
But when an affair becomes a real relationship this knowledge will be needed!
In reality relationships should be easy to be in.
The key to making that happen is that the couple must understand what they must do to make that happen.
One sixty-year-old lady, I worked with went through 3 divorces only to discover she was a significant contributor to the problems that lead her to divorce each one.
She didn’t have this knowledge and blamed them all.
There was so much she could have done to help, but instead, without knowing, she set them all up to fail.
That’s a hard message to hear.