Can you talk yourself into a better life?
by Mira and Charles on March 22nd, 2010How what you talk about can change your relationship and your life
Is it possible that what you talk about can change your life? A new study (plus all my experience as a therapist) suggests that the answer is Yes. You can change your life by changing what you talk about.
The study, as discussed in the New York Times, reports the modest finding that people who talk about deeper, more serious topics are happier than people who talk about the weather or who won last night’s game. Small talk is the road to feeling miserable.
This is enormously suggestive. It means that we have our fate in our hands much more than we might think.
One obvious implication is that you can make yourself happier if you just commit to having more interesting conversations with everyone you run into. “Deep” doesn’t have to mean talking about the most profound topics imaginable. A conversation about a TV would be scored as meaningful if you talked about the characters in a more interesting, less superficial level, say by talking about their personalities and what might have shaped them.
This works to make us happy because of our tremendous hunger for meaning and connection. We feel more connected with someone when we talk about more serious things. We feel more meaning when we talk about more important things. It’s so simple.
It’s why therapy will always have an important role in our society. It’s often the only way for someone to talk about what’s most meaningful to her with someone who won’t judge.
The other implication I want to mention here is what this means for our relationships. A marriage is, perhaps on the deepest level, a conversation. Who you are to each other is what you talk about. Now at the beginning of most relationships we usually spend a lot of time talking about things that are really meaningful to us. It’s all out on the table: from “Do you believe in an afterlife?” to “What are your happiest memories?”
Then, too often, it descends into endless conversations about what color to paint the kitchen or who should pick up Junior after school on Friday. The small talk of marriage. And it’s no less small talk because it’s about things that are important to you. It’s small talk because it’s about unimportant aspects of the things that are important to you.
But you can change your life if you turn this around. What if the two of you decided to deepen the average level of your conversations. Yeah, Junior still needs to be picked up on Friday. I mean, you can’t just leave him standing there. But you can always ask yourselves about any moment or any conversation, “What would be a more meaningful way to go here?”
I promise: it will feel like falling in love all over again.
For more help with this, please check out the indispensable Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad.
If you’re not sure whether you and your partner should even try to work things out, please check out Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. You’ll probably find the answers you’re looking for.
And if you need one-on-one help with this, it’s just the kind of thing we do here at The Chestnut Hill Institute.
