Why we don't speak up

And why we should

“If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.” My dad has repeated this phrase to me since I was a young girl. Thanks to his guidance, I learned to ask the tough questions and speak up in school, at work and when negotiating.

Asking for what I wanted in relationships was a different challenge, however. Sharing what I needed made me feel needy (somewhere along society’s patriarchal norms, my mind got infiltrated).

I didn’t want to start a debate or a difficult conversation for fear of rocking the relationship. I knew that I’d feel uncomfortable bringing difficult conversations up, but the fear was larger than that. I was afraid of losing the other person. (This was likely a learned behavior, watching the other relationships in my life – the women in my family seldom asked for what they wanted. And when they did, their requests were often ignored.)

Sometimes, we believe that if we withhold our thoughts and feelings around what we’re looking for, it’s better for a relationship. We believe that preserving a relationship is more important than growing in a relationship – because growing might mean taking different paths. In truth, the quicker we speak up, the sooner we know whether a relationship is right for us – or not. This applies to romantic relationships just as much as friendships.

Recently, I’ve had many conversations with friends, discussing the challenges of communicating openly in a romantic relationship. This tends to happen more often earlier on in a relationship, but it’s prevalent in long-term relationships and in friendships as well. We set up communication patterns that get prolonged over time, and at some point, it becomes challenging to break them. The most common responses against having difficult conversations include:

“What if my speaking up ruins the relationship?”

If speaking up about something important to us ends a relationship, then that relationship didn’t have the right foundation or strength to begin with. It means it would have likely been wiped out sooner than later. We ultimately did ourselves a favor by speaking our truth versus withholding information. A relationship will not be lost if it’s real. I hope we all remember this, myself included. I like to think that the only relationships that have fallen away after a difficult conversation were those that were never meant to be in my life, or those that had spanned their season.

“Right now’s not the right time.”

Timing is important. If the person we’re dating is having a week of challenges stockpiling, then it might not be the right time to have a difficult conversation. But we can’t make this excuse forever. In truth, there will never be a perfect time for a tough conversation. Instead of putting it off, we can listen to our intuition to help guide us. Listening to our inner guidance can help us sense readiness or receptiveness within ourselves and observe similar cues in the person we’re wanting to share with. This can include subtle cues, nonverbal signals, current mood, and environment.

“I’m afraid to speak up, because I’m not completely clear about what I want … even if I get clear on what I want, what if what I want changes?”

We must get clarity on what we want, first. Sometimes, we pretend to not know what we want, in hopes that the person in front of us will tell us what they want. In this way, we lose our personal power. It takes self-knowledge, understanding why we feel the way we feel. (My Writing Sherpa, Julie Tallard Johnson, writes about the specifics of understanding ourselves in her book The Zero Point Agreement.) Once we do know what we want, it’s okay for that thing to change. We negotiate relationships at every stage of growth. We’re allowed to have subsequent conversations about our wants and needs as they evolve.

“I feel like they know what I want, they know me…”

No matter how close we are to someone, we can’t expect another human to read our minds. We need to remember that we’re all living inside our own heads, and the person in front of us has a different perspective, background, and worldview – and likely sees things differently. If we don’t communicate our perspective, they may never understand. Having a difficult conversation allows for some type of connection to take place.

I’m empathetic to this because I’ve used many of the same reasons – excuses, really – for why I shouldn’t speak up in a relationship. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do.   

Sometimes, some of my biggest fears took place, and a relationship ruptured because of my speaking up. I had difficult conversations end a thirteen-year-long friendship. I was hoping to communicate something that my friend was not open to hearing. I’ve had romances end because I spoke up about what I was looking for. I dated a man whose words and actions were confusing, and I was never sure if he wanted a platonic relationship or a romantic one. I finally spoke up one day, asking for clarity about where we stood, and let him know what I wanted. He didn’t want the same things I did. If I hadn’t spoken up, I would have simply prolonged the relationship.

When we don’t speak up for what we need in a relationship, we’re not honoring ourselves or our voices. We put our own needs on the back burner. And when we don’t honor our needs, we grow internally resentful, or worse – we start to lose who we are, becoming just a shell of ourselves.

Tough conversations will always help us clarify what’s important to us, stand up for ourselves, and develop stronger self-worth and connection. And when we’re able to withstand the discomfort of those conversations, not only will we grow stronger – our relationships will, too.