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Automatic transcript; may contain mistakes, especially in Hebrew.
First of all, I'd like to thank our anonymous sponsor for this week's question. If you're looking to sponsor anything going on in Nitzotzos, please email us at nitzotzos at gmail dot com. For just $18, you can sponsor a shir, a dvartora, an event, or a Q&A. This week's question is, In a recent response, you mentioned that in arguments and communication, it is important to acknowledge your spouse's perspective as a valid experience. This is, as you said, not a novel idea, and it's how I try to manage every single conversation I have with my spouse. However, how do you handle conversations when your spouse doesn't acknowledge that your feelings, perspective, experience is equally valid? In other words, when you're trying to quote-unquote fight fair, so to speak, what do you do when your spouse doesn't communicate with that same level of respect and sensitivity? So I'd like to just highlight two words that you wrote that you put in quotation marks. And the words you wrote were fight fair.
It really depends on the goal of the communication. When we see, and I know you didn't mean it this way, but when we see our communications with our spouses as fighting, then we both lose. Even if you win the argument, now you're married to a loser. So there is no fighting in these conversations. Very often what happens is that one of the partners will be more emotionally advanced than the other, more sensitive, more respectful, more willing to validate the other person's experience. In many cases, especially as the marriage begins, the woman is more sensitive than the man. And the reason is because the nature of communication for men is very different than women. Women were given Tisha Kavin of speech, nine measures of speech. And I believe that that refers not to the quantity of speech, but to the quality of speech. Women are more natural communicators. And they're more ready to validate the other person's experience. When you hear two guys speaking, they're generally problem solving for each other. When two women speak,
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they're validating each other's feelings. Check out a great video on YouTube called It's Not About the Nail. It's an amazing video, even though it's a comedy bit. It really does hit the nail on the head. So, women in general are more likely to communicate in a respectful fashion, acknowledging and validating the other person's experience. Very often, men aren't even aware that that's what they're supposed to be doing. So first of all, they should be taught that. That's something that rebellion have a responsibility to do. But if they haven't, for whatever reason, it's okay for you to say to your spouse, it's. uncomfortable for me when my experience is less valid than yours. And because the goal of these conversations is to establish healthy communication where we can both see each other, it's important to me that you let me know that you've heard the thing that I've said and that it resonates as a valid experience. Be prepared for some blowback where a man says, but it's wrong. That's not the facts. That's not what happens. Unfortunately, too many men have been raised in the facts don't care about your feelings.
generation. Facts definitely do care. They do care about our feelings. There is very little objectivity and a very little objective understanding of the quote unquote truth. Each one of us has an experience of the truth. One person thinks that it happened this way, the other person is sure that it happened a different way. Instead of trying to win the argument, what we need to do is see each other, and that's the goal. So on the one hand, we can't see it, even if we are more emotionally aware, we can't see it as there needs to be a fighting, a fair fighting environment. It's never a fight, it's always a communication. What we're looking for is an equal opportunity to share our feelings and have them validated. And if that's what you want, and if that's what you need in a relationship, so then you have to communicate that in a respectful fashion, letting a person know without accusing them and saying, my experience is that when we're having these conversations, I'm really trying to see you and let you know that you're experiencing this. That your experience is valid.
And it's important to me that you do the same for me. I would also encourage you to raise the feeling that you're feeling. So it would sound like it makes me feel unsafe or unseen in the conversations, when I say something and you say, that's not what happened. It allows the person not just to understand what they need to do, but what's going on inside of yourself. And when building the relationship, it's important not just to have a communication where we transmit ideas, but where we transmit feelings. Letting the other person know, this is what comes up for me. By doing that, it also allows you to examine what is the part that you're bringing. So for example, if you're feeling unsafe because you're... not being validated in the conversation it's very likely that some of that is coming from your spouse who's not validating you it's also very likely that there's a part of it that's coming from a previous part of your life something earlier in your childhood and maybe that's.
something for you to consider that you're saying okay i want to be safe and i want to be seen but some of that is my stuff and even if my husband does create safety and does see me i may not be capable of feeling safe because of things that i'm bringing into the relationship from when i was a child
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