The Long View: Talk isn’t cheap, it’s the gold standard of good relationships

Myself and my husband are always talking. And we’ve always talked. A million years ago, when we first started hanging out as friends, we’d talk all through lunchtime. On work nights out, we’d seek each other out and chat long into the night.

We had a lot in common. We liked much of the same music (except his questionable love of Rod Stewart), we were both creative, and we were interested in each other’s lives. I loved hearing his stories about his childhood; he has the most incredible memory and can describe incidents from when he was a young kid in minute detail. And he loved hearing about all the places I’d been, as his own family hadn’t travelled at all.

Inevitably, our interest in each other developed into a deeper connection, and here we are almost 25 years later, still talking.

Do we talk too much? Probably. For the past 15 years we’ve both worked from home. In the same office. We took coffee breaks together and lunch together. And then we were together after work, and on the weekends.

It was just the two of us after all, talking our way through money worries, job stresses, disappointment, heartache, grief. Kind of like our own talk therapy.

We talked about everything. We were each other’s sounding boards, counsellors, career consultants, medical experts, dream analysts, cheerleaders, critics. Most of that talking served a purpose. When I needed to be lifted out of a funk, I’d ask my husband to tell me again, for the 23rd time, that story about the time he ran into the back of a bus at the end of Grafton Street. When he needed a confidence boost I’d remind him of all the wonderful designs he’d created.

Since our daughter has come along things have changed a little. We don’t have as much time for those rambling conversations we used to have. But we’re never short of things to talk about, even if 75 percent of our chats now are about funny, annoying, interesting or infuriating things our daughter has done. On our monthly nights out we try to steer the conversation away from our daughter. We give ourselves 30 minutes at the beginning of the night to talk about her and then we move on.

We’ve had tricky patches over the years but through them all we’ve continued to talk, even if sometimes that talking was more like shouting. During one particularly difficult time we thought we might see a couples counsellor. We had an introductory phone call with them where we outlined the issues we had, gave the counsellor a rundown of how we both felt, and told them what we were doing to try to deal with the issues. They said we’d pretty much couple-counselled ourselves.

Our honest and open communication (probably too open, truth be told) has stood to us over the years. It’s gotten us through so much. And yes, we probably do talk too much, but I would be more concerned if we weren’t talking at all.

If you have trouble communicating with your partner, or anyone, check out our communication masterclass to discover some tools, techniques and exercises that you can use to have better, more effective conversations.