Unmasking Vulnerability: The Power of Courageous Conversations in Relationships

Dishonesty and the subsequent trust erosion that occurs from it doesn't always manifest as lies. Sometimes it's simply the absence of truth.

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Sometimes I’m afraid to tell the truth.

Maybe I don’t want to sadden or anger someone. Maybe I don’t want to deal with others’ judgment—real or, perhaps more often, imagined. Regardless, it always comes down to me imagining some uncomfortable outcome, so it’s probably best not to say anything at all, I might think.

Maybe you do this too. Probably everyone does.

I hear stories from coaching clients indicating they suffer the same affliction.

Some people might call it lying. I don’t think of it that way. To me, it’s more the withholding of truth, and often is motivated by a desire to not hurt others. But in the context of relationship health, I’m not sure that it matters how well intentioned the deceit might be.

When relationships require safety and trust to maintain health and viability, hiding truth is probably just as harmful as outright lies.

I don’t believe husbands, or men in general, are necessarily more likely to operate this way than their wives, or women in general, but within my work specifically, it’s very common to hear from women in hetero relationships trying to navigate relationships with men who aren’t being all-the-way honest with them.

It usually goes like this:

“My husband isn’t honest with me, Matt. I don’t feel as if I can trust him.”

“It makes perfect sense that trust would be eroded if you feel like he’s not being honest with you. Do you mean he lies to you?”

“Not necessarily,” she says. “When he speaks, I have every reason to believe he’s telling me the truth. I wouldn’t call him a liar. What I will say is that I know he has thoughts—about life, about me, about our marriage—but he doesn’t let me access them. I know that my husband thinks and feels things, but he often won’t share them with me. So, he’s either hiding things on purpose to be deceptive, or he’s protecting himself from me and won’t let me in. Either way, I don’t know how we’re supposed to connect and trust one another if he won’t tell me the truth.”

…

It makes sense to be a little fearful or anxious about what someone might think or feel about us when they know the whole truth, and we’re afraid they might not like it. That they might reject us or think less of us after. Or at least, I perceive it to be more the rule than the exception among people in general.

But I want to continue to work to be the kind of person who bravely tells the most truth possible about what goes on in my head and heart to the people with whom I have close, personal relationships.

And I hope you’ll do the same.

…

It’s come to my attention over the past year since the release of my book “This is How Your Marriage Ends” that there are a lot of people out there afraid of their romantic partners discovering that they’re reading it. Many people have chosen to listen to the audio version instead of reading a physical copy to avoid the uncomfortable conversation about a book with that jarring—or threatening?—of a title sitting on their nightstand or coffee table.

I get it. If I didn’t realize my wife was concerned about our marriage, and I was living my life in blissful ignorance, I too would be shaken and a little scared and/or offended about seeing that book title. (Even though the book’s subtitle is intended to soften the blow: “A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships.”)

I’ve probably hid a thousand little things from a thousand people over the years, so you’ll neither read nor hear any judgment from me about this type of behavior. But if your relationship partner, and the relationship itself have value to you—are sacred to you—then please consider spending time thinking about whether you are valuing your private feelings—your comfort—more than your marriage or romantic partnership with someone you profess to love.

Nothing correlates with relationship success (read: health and longevity) as much as an environment of safety and trust. And that can only be achieved through vulnerable honesty and sharing with one another the truest things we think and feel. When you share all of the scary stuff you’ve been hiding or shielding your partner from, and they choose you anyway? When they truly love you for you? That’s the level of connection—the glue—that keeps people together.

If you’re reading a book designed to strengthen your bond and improve the health of your relationship, how can that possibly be bad or threatening to a marriage or partnership? In many cases, one of the partners is predicting that the other won’t take the news well that they might be hurt or afraid or sad or otherwise unhappy in the relationship. To which I ask: If someone you love is suffering, or your relationship has some fatal flaw of which you might be unaware, don’t you WANT to know about it? Don’t you WANT to help them, even if it’s a little inconvenient? Even if you don’t feel exactly the same?

When my wife told me at the dinner table one night that she wasn’t sure she still loved me and wasn’t sure she wanted to remain married, I took it hard. I pouted and made it entirely about me. I moved into the guest room using the logic that I wasn’t going to share a bed with someone who was no longer sure she loved me or wanted to be with me. That whiny me-first way of dealing with it made sense to me at the time, which more or less sums up why I’m no longer married.

The much more useful, mature and healthy way of handling that would have been to lean into the discomfort, seek to legitimately understand how things I was doing and not doing in the marriage were resulting in painful, negative experiences for my wife, and then work to protect her and our family from those same results moving forward.

In other words, I was in so much denial about my culpability in the marriage, that it took me more than a year before I started honestly trying to define the problem. My wife reached out to me for help, and instead of embracing the opportunity to help her, and in doing so, helping myself and my son, I chose to protect my fragile ego at her expense. Of course, I suffered for it too. It took just 18 months in the guest room to cement my fate. And I have no one to blame but myself.

Please choose courage in your relationship conversations. If something is so painful or so wrong that you can’t imagine living this way forever, then please try hard to be brave. It is scary to have hard conversations. But I’ve come to believe that relationships often wither and die on the vine with everyone just trying to not rock the boat, or who might be withholding truth for various reasons—some noble, some not.

It is the only way to ensure that trust blossoms. That connections are strong. That love remains.

The alternative, for most of us, is so much worse. But I think a nicer, more useful way to think about it is that choosing courage is so much better.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.