"Explain It To Me Like You're Telling a Friend"

A few years ago, an ex partner and I would sometimes get lost in our communication styles. Not because we didn't care, but because we were constantly dancing around our thoughts and emotions—tiptoeing to preserve the other's feelings instead of really talking. We tried to articulate what we were feeling. We wanted to be open. But somehow, we kept missing each other. No matter how hard we tried, it often felt like neither of us were able to understand what the other needed.

I call my best friend about literally anything. Our friendship is probably one of the most unique connections I share with another person. We met ten years ago at a Buddhist university in Boulder, and even though I said my goodbyes to Colorado after only one semester, she's been by my side ever since.

Our conversations consist of reassuring one another, reminding each other that it's okay to feel the things we feel, acknowledging when one of us is in the wrong, and continuously validating each other's experiences. When something's gone wrong, I call her. I lay it all out—what I felt, what I think the other person felt, where I knew I was wrong or where I thought I might have been wrong, what the other person might have misunderstood, and how I could clear that up or apologize. (You can imagine how much my therapist LOVES listening to me talk in every direction, lol.) And there are times when she straight up tells me what I did was wrong. Other times she tells me to cut the shit—that I knew I was clearly in the right. This woman will listen to me talk in circles until I'm blue in the face, and I truly mean that. I got so very lucky in knowing her.

So, of course, one misunderstanding later, I found myself—once again—on the phone, explaining my thoughts and feelings in full detail, in full emotion. And without missing a beat, she got it. She understood me. She offered insight, validation, and solutions. It was so effortless.

Why is it so much easier to explain ourselves to our friends than to our partners? What was I saying differently on the phone that I couldn't manage to get out face-to-face? Why did it feel safer?

And then I found the answer. It was because I wasn't filtering myself. I wasn't worried about saying it the right way or bracing for backlash. Granted—she's known me quite some time. She knows my heart and the way I think about things, and I had to take that into consideration. But I was just being honest—the kind of honest we reserve for the people who already see us. That's when I found the solution: "explain it to me like you're telling a friend."

I went to my then-partner and told her that I was going to explain how I felt as if I were telling a friend about what happened— someone that wasn't her. I spoke like I was talking to someone else: I used her name instead of saying 'you.' I laid out what happened, why I was upset, what I wasn't understanding, how I think it could be fixed, and expressed my desire to fix the issue. And suddenly, I saw something shift. It was as if, the moment I removed the pressure, the fear, the performance—we finally heard each other. It worked. Hearing my side in that way helped her to understand why I had reacted the way I did.

It's funny how, on the outside of things, we often have so much clarity when listening to our friends. There have been so many times a friend has called me in some kind of distress about their relationship, and laid it out in the same way I do with mine. And usually, it takes us no time to gather where things went wrong for our friends in their romantic dynamics and we're quick to offer solutions. But I've found it's not uncommon to see those same experiences played back in our own relationships and suddenly, we can't find the words.

We give our platonic connections the benefit of the doubt, we listen with this sense of patience. We allow them to be flawed, to feel deeply, to be confused. But when it comes to our romantic connections, dynamics or partners, things can get twisted quite easily. We do this thing where we try to manage someone else's perception of us to keep this sense of peace. In love, I rehearse. I pause, edit, overthink. And somewhere in that effort to be perfect, there are times where I find myself starting to lose the message. The stakes feel higher. We're more guarded. We don't want to come off too sensitive, too cold, too intense, too anything. But I can't think of a single time I've done that with a friend. One wrong thing said—and the person we love could vanish from our life completely. Who wants to risk that? If love is supposed to be our safest place, why is it often the hardest space to say what we mean? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that friendship holds something romantic love often forgets: grace.

Since then, I have used this tactic in other relationships—sometimes even before conversations become hard. I have no idea if this strategy has ever been used elsewhere or if it's already "a thing"—but it's changed how I show up for the "harder conversations."

Do we really suck at communicating in relationships...or do we just need to pretend we're on the phone with our best friend?