When You're Both Trying to Be Heard, but Neither Feels Understood
Have you ever had a conversation with your partner where you both end up feeling misunderstood?
You try to explain why something upset you. Your partner explains why they saw things differently. You try again, hoping they'll finally understand what you mean but somehow, the conversation keeps going around in circles. You both want to be heard. Yet neither of you seems to be getting through to the other.
When explaining becomes exhausting
When something matters deeply to us, we want our partner to understand why. We want them to see what we experienced, how it affected us and why we reacted as we did. So we explain again. We give more detail and we remind them of what happened before, when they still don't seem to understand, frustration can set in.
The frustration
Our partner may be doing exactly the same thing, trying just as hard to explain their own experience. Before long, neither person feels heard, and the conversation becomes exhausting.
It's not necessarily that either person doesn't care. They may both care very much. But in the effort to get their own experience recognised, they can lose sight of what the other person is trying to say.
Two different experiences of the same moment
One of the difficulties in relationships is that two people can experience the same situation very differently. One partner may remember a comment as hurtful and dismissive, the other may remember it as an attempt to explain something or defend themselves. One feels rejected and the other feels unfairly criticized.
Both may be genuinely describing how the situation felt to them but when each person is trying to convince the other that their version is the correct one, there can be little room to explore what the experience meant to each of them. The conversation becomes about establishing what happened, rather than understanding why it mattered. The original hurt can get lost along the way.
Understanding doesn't mean agreeing
Perhaps one of the hardest things to accept in a relationship is that your partner may not see things as you do. They may remember a conversation differently and they may not have intended to hurt you, even though you were hurt. They may have reasons for their reaction that you haven't fully understood.
Listening to their experience doesn't mean you have to abandon your own and acknowledging their feelings doesn't mean that yours matter any less. You can understand why something affected your partner without agreeing with every detail of their account.
Sometimes, what matters most is knowing that your experience has been heard and taken seriously, even when the other person sees things differently.
When both people want to be understood
When couples become stuck in this pattern, both can end up feeling alone. Each may believe they have tried everything to explain themselves and may wonder why the other person simply doesn't seem to understand, and the more this happens, the harder it can become to approach the next conversation with openness.
Perhaps the way forward begins with recognizing that both people have an experience worth understanding, not because both are always equally responsible for what has happened, or because every disagreement has a simple solution but because a relationship can struggle when one person's experience leaves no room for the other's.
Sometimes, the most meaningful conversations begin when we no longer feel we have to win the argument in order for our feelings to matter. We can still disagree and we can still acknowledge hurt and take responsibility for our actions. There can also be room to listen, to be curious and to try to understand what the other person has been experiencing.
You don't have to see things in exactly the same way to begin to understand each other.
If your relationship feels stuck
If you and your partner keep having conversations that leave you feeling misunderstood, it can be difficult to find a way forward on your own.
Couples counselling can provide a space to slow things down, explore each other's experiences and better understand what has been happening between you.
You don't need to agree on everything, or have the right words, before you begin.