Effectively communicating your needs in a relationship is crucial for its success. This blog post explores strategies to help you discuss your needs with your partner, even when they differ. Key takeaways include staying persistent, understanding each other’s needs, asking open-ended questions, embracing differences, and using personality assessments and love languages. Open communication helps create a strong foundation for meeting each other’s needs and fostering a fulfilling relationship.

How To Communicate Needs In Your Relationship

If you want your relationship to thrive, it’s essential to communicate your needs effectively. However, discussing your needs with your partner can be challenging, especially when your expectations and desires differ. In this blog post, we’ll explore various strategies and approaches to help you effectively communicate your needs, and develop a healthier, more fulfilling relationship with your partner.

Stay Persistent In Communicating Your Needs To Your Partner

Have you ever said something like “I need more time to myself”, then received a reply that was so far from what you needed to hear that you just gave up? This can be extremely frustrating, so let’s look at how to communicate your needs in your relationship more effectively.

When you don’t get the response you’re looking for the first time, it might feel like you’ve failed. For your relationship to grow, see if you can look at these moments instead as opportunities to go deeper.

For example, if you say “I need more time to myself” and your partner says something like…

“I don’t get any time to myself!”
“You go to your yoga class.”
“We’ve got two kids, what did you expect?”

… it’s completely understandable if you feel like giving up, and even withdrawing altogether.

It can be hard enough to say what you need in the first place, so staying with it when you’re feeling angry, frustrated, or let down like this isn’t always easy. But when you give up too soon, you’ll be unlikely to get the change you’re looking for.

If you really want to get your needs met, you’ll need to stay with it – so let’s look at how.

Stay Curious To Understand Each Other’s Needs Better

People generally do want the people they love to get their needs met. So in my work as a relationship therapist, when I see one partner pushing back against the other’s needs, it makes me really curious. And the partner who stated the need is often curious too. But often their frustration takes over, and they ask something like, “why are you saying/being like that?!”

When you get frustrated, see if you can slow things down. Ask your partner gently, from a place of genuine, compassionate curiosity, about what it was like for them when you expressed your need. This way, you’re much more likely to learn something helpful, and make progress towards getting your needs met.

Ask Open-Ended Questions To Explore Your Partner’s Experience

Here are some examples of how you could lean into the conversation, and keep communicating about your needs:

“When I said I need more time to myself and you mentioned how you don’t get enough time to yourself either, I felt sad and lonely. I imagined you weren’t interested in trying to change this. I want us both to be able to get our need for time to feel like ourselves met. Will you tell me a bit about what the lack of alone time lately has been like for you?”

“When I said I need more time to myself and you said that I go to my yoga class, I felt frustrated. I see me going to my exercise class as meeting one of my basic needs, but I imagined you see it as a luxury. Then I wondered whether maybe that hour is quite hard for you. What is it like for you when I go to yoga?”

“When I said I need more time to myself and you said “we’ve got two kids, what did you expect?”, I felt angry. I imagined you thought I should just give up on the idea of having time to myself, but I don’t want that for either of us. I’m curious about why you responded like that. What’s it like for you when I ask you to take care of the kids so that I can get some time to feel like myself again?”

You probably noticed that all of these examples end with a question about your partner’s experience. This is because most of us are open to helping the people we love get what they need – as long as we’re getting what we need too. So giving some space to your partner’s needs can help deepen your conversations. When you encourage your partner to open up about their needs too, you can start working together to facilitate each other’s needs. This can create a powerful shift in tone, ending the pattern where you’re both struggling to get your needs met.

Embrace Differences In Your Needs And Boundaries For A Mutually Satisfying Relationship

Sometimes conversations about your needs in your relationship might get sidetracked because your needs and your partner’s are quite different.

For example, I’m an introvert and a highly-sensitive person, so I need lots of alone time. My husband is very different to me, so he could easily say things like, “well I don’t expect you to take the kids out so that I can get time at home on my own!” But he’s only likely to think something like this if his needs are not getting met, or if my request crosses one of his boundaries.

Comparing needs isn’t helpful. Work instead towards each of you taking responsibility for our own needs. That means communicating them clearly, and asking for and taking what you need in order to get them met – even when they’re different.

How To Understand Your Differences: Use Open-Ended Questions, Personality Assessments, and Love Languages

You might feel like you know your partner well, and you probably do. But people change an enormous amount over their lives, especially when going though big life changes like becoming parents.

The better you know yourself and your partner, the easier it will be to communicate your needs and both get them met – even when they seem contradictory.

Use Open-Ended Questions To Keep Getting To Know Each Other As Your Needs Change

The best way to keep getting to know each other over the years is to keep talking, and especially to ask each other lots of open-ended questions. You can download a free list of 72 open-ended questions which have have been specifically chosen to bring you closer here.

Some of the differences in our needs are about variation in our personalities, and there are some great tools you can use to understand these differences better. The better you understand yourself, the easier it is to accept yourself and what works for you, and to ask your partner to do the same.

Understand Each Other’s Personalities And Associated Needs

For example, have you ever taken a Myers-Briggs personality test? This test was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs, based on the work of the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung. It can be a great way to start a conversation with your partner about your differences and needs. For example, perhaps one of you feels energised by parties, but the other feels drained by social interaction? Or maybe one of you prefers to make more plans, while the other likes to be more spontaneous? Understanding each other better can help to take some of the tension out of your different preferences and approaches to life.

Understand Each Other’s Ways Of Expressing And Feeling Love

How about the 5 Love Languages quiz? This is a useful tool for gaining a better understanding of how you express love, and what makes you feel most loved. Please note, however, that the best way to use this information is to broaden your awareness of all the ways we can express and feel love, not to demand or insist on any one specific expression.

Often we only discuss differences like this when something has happened to create tension around them. Talking about your differences when you’re both happy and relaxed can help you to look at them more dispassionately. Ultimately you can get to a place where you can see how your differences are actually your strengths as a couple – as long as you respect and value each other’s personality traits and quirks (and each other more generally). If you need support getting to this place, you can find out more about relationship therapy and coaching here.

How To Communicate Your Needs To Your Partner

When it comes to communicating your needs in your relationship, the top things to remember are:

If your partner doesn’t seem open to meeting your needs, consider whether their needs are getting met too
It’s normal to have different needs and give to each other in different ways
The better you know yourself and your partner, the easier you’ll find it to assert your needs