Why Do So Many Women Rehearse Difficult Conversations?

The Cost of Needing to Be Told You're Good: Why He Can't Hear Your Hurt

I’ve lost count of the number of women who tell me the same thing.

Before they ever say a word to their partner, they’ve spent hours, days and sometimes weeks working out how to say something to them. Not because they don’t know what they think or can’t find the words because they know exactly what they want to say. They also know it matters and they know he needs to hear it.

I’ve heard them say things like “I’ve been thinking about how to tell him for ages”, “I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to say it without upsetting him”, “I’ve rehearsed this conversation in my head a thousand times” or “I’ve changed the words over and over because I don’t want him to think I’m attacking him.” The list goes on.

What always stands out to me when I hear these comments spoken, isn’t how difficult the conversation itself sounds, it’s usually very straightforward and even simple, it’s how much time, effort and work has already gone into it before it’s even begun.

By the time she walks into the room, she hasn’t simply thought about what she wants to say, she’s anticipated his reaction, prepared for his defensiveness, softened her language, removed anything that might sound critical, added reassurance, chosen the right moment, considered his mood, thought about how to make him feel safe and has a well thought out list of mitigations in case it all goes horribly wrong.

She’s carried the entire emotional weight of the conversation before she’s even started.

Looking back at my own life, I now understand why that happens because I was him, I was exactly the kind of man that made a woman feel like she had to do that, and I never knew. I never knew because I was far too insecure to be remotely able to hear ay feedback that might have made me confront the fact that I wasn’t the great partner and man I projected to the world.

I never thought I was difficult to talk to. In fact if you’d asked me twenty years ago whether I welcomed honest conversations and feedback, I would have said yes and I would have meant it because I genuinely believed I did. I believed I wanted openness, for us to be able to talk about anything and I genuinely I thought I was someone who could take feedback.

Looking back, I know that what I believed to be true about me, what was actually true about me and what my partner experienced as true about me were not remotely the same thing.

I was perfectly happy to hear things that fitted with the picture I already had of myself.

What I was simply not capable of hearing about myself were things that challenged that carefully curated image of myself. From my perspective, I wasn’t defending myself at all, rather I was explaining myself, I was adding context and I was making sure she understood what I really meant because surely she had to be wrong about me if she thought bad things.

That’s what my insecure ego told myself even though the truth was something completely different.

If my partner tried to tell me that something I’d done had hurt her, I wouldn’t hear her experience because I couldn’t. Somehow between her speaking and me listening, her “That hurt me” became “You’re a bad partner” which then became “You’re a bad person”. Her “I felt dismissed” became “You’re failing” which became “You’re a bad person”.

A conversation about something I’d done, quietly became a conversation about who I was, even though that wasn’t the conversation she was trying to have at all.

I’ve found myself wondering how often that happens, how often one person is talking about behaviour while the other is hearing something about their identity because they’re not the same thing at all. In fact they’re two completely different conversations.

If somebody tells me I’ve interrupted them three times today, they’re talking about my behaviour but if I hear “You’re selfish” or “You’re not the man you think you are,” then we’ve left the conversation she was trying to have about her experience and entered one that exists almost entirely inside my own head about me.

Once that shift happens, curiosity isn’t possible because if I believe my identity is under threat, understanding her experience becomes secondary to protecting my identify and image. The conversation stops being about what happened and what I can do about it to becoming one about proving that I’m not the person I suddenly fear she thinks I am.

That’s one of the cruellest tricks insecurity plays.

It quietly convinces us that feedback is actually an accusation and a personal attack, that a disagreement is actually personal rejection, that handing him accountability for his own actions and behaviour is a way to humiliate him and that somebody else’s experience of us somehow diminishes our own worth. When that happens, curiosity and willingness to reflect and change disappears and defensiveness takes its place.

Looking back, I now know that my partner at the time didn’t want a partner who never got anything wrong but rather a partner who could hear that he’d got something wrong without needing her to spend half her life carefully packaging the message in a way that protected my sense of myself before she was finally allowed to talk about her own experience.

Just writing this makes me feel ashamed that I put someone else, never mind the woman I loved, through such an unnecessary and tortuous time and that’s before I even acknowledge the amount of shared joy and happiness I never allowed to happen because of that.

No one should have to become a diplomat simply to tell the person they love how they feel.

Which brings me to a question that I’ve been sitting with ever since I thought about writing this article. It’s not the questions we usually ask such as why women don’t speak up sooner, why they keep things bottled up or why they struggle to speak honestly in their relationships, even though they might appear understandable questions to ask.

The question I have been sitting with is this:

Why do so many women feel responsible for preparing a man to hear the truth before they feel safe enough to tell it?

She’s not rehearsing the conversation; she’s rehearsing his ability to receive it. She’s not preparing her words; she’s preparing him. Somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted that as normal, which means that somewhere along the way we’ve also accepted that the burden of successful communication rests entirely on her shoulders while his only responsibility is to show up and, if she’s really, really lucky, to listen.

Except he’s unlikely to do that either.

He’s defending, he’s deflecting, he’s explaining why she’s clearly misunderstood him, he’s adding context she never asked for to redirect the conversation, he’s proving he’s not the person he thinks she thinks he is and he’s protecting his identity whilst she’s managing his reaction.

Then we call that a communication problem on her side.

Perhaps we’ve spent years helping women become better communicators when what we really need to do is to help more men to become able and willing to hear the truth without experiencing it as a threat to who they believe they are.