

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Crucial Conversations" by Kerry Patterson. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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Do you want to know how to have a difficult conversation with your partner? Are there issues in the relationship you’re not sure how to address?
In all relationships, communication is key. Learning how to have a difficult conversation with your partner can lead to a better and more open relationship.
Why Learn How To Have Difficult Conversations With Your Spouse?
Failed crucial conversations can cause relationships to fail.
When people break up they often blame it on differences of opinion on important issues. But while everyone argues about important issues, clearly not every relationship ends in turmoil — it’s how you argue that matters. So how do you learn how to have a difficult conversation with your partner?
From the authors’ research observing couples, they found that people handle difficult conversations in one of three ways:
- They resort to threats and name-calling.
- They retreat into angry silence.
- They speak honestly and effectively.
The researchers found that helping couples hold crucial conversations more effectively reduced their chances of unhappiness or breakup by more than half.
There are many crucial conversation topics that, if mishandled, can lead to disastrous results in your personal life or at work. They include:
- Personal: Ending a relationship, asking a roommate to move out, resolving a custody issue with an ex-spouse, dealing with a troubled teen, confronting a loved one about problem behavior.
- Work: Confronting a coworker about a problem, giving the boss critical feedback, critiquing a colleague’s work, presenting a negative performance review, confronting a team member who isn’t following through, confronting a coworker who has poor hygiene.
Why Crucial Conversations Fail
To learn how to have a difficult conversation with your partner, it’s important to know why conversations fail. Despite the importance of crucial conversations, we often avoid them because we’re afraid we’ll make matters worse. If total avoidance isn’t possible, we may send emails or leave messages instead of talking face-to-face.
When we do have crucial conversations, we handle them badly. We behave our worst at the most critical moments. We yell, withdraw, or say things we later regret. This happens because:
- Nature works against us. When under stress, whether physically or emotionally, we’re genetically programmed to respond with fight or flight. We get an adrenaline surge and blood is diverted from the brain to muscles so that our thinking ability suffers.
- We get caught off guard. Crucial conversations often catch us by surprise — someone blurts out something and we have little time to think. We have a knee-jerk reaction and later end up wondering, what was I thinking?
- We lack the right skills. We don’t know where to start in terms of responding to or initiating a crucial conversation, so we just plunge in. You can sometimes practice for crucial conversations, but you have to know what to practice — and even with practice you can still screw up.
- We act in self-defeating ways. We act in ways that keep us from getting what we want. We’re our own worst enemies. For example, when one partner is neglecting the other, the injured partner may respond with sarcasm and sniping — which causes the offending party to spend even less time with the injured party.
Relationships, careers, organizations, and communities are built on the ability to talk about high-stakes, difficult topics. Therefore, mishandled conversations have a huge impact. In fact, they’re at the root of a majority of persistent problems in organizations, teams, and relationships. Learning how to have a difficult conversation with your spouse can help with those important relationship problems.
People often think their situations are unique and that dialogue skills outlined in this book don’t apply, or won’t work. According to the authors, the skills do in fact apply to virtually any issue, although some problems are more challenging than others.
Examples of Difficult Conversations With Your Spouse
While you’re learning how to have a difficult conversation with your partner, it’s helpful to look to some examples. These examples offer a few common crucial conversations, how to have a difficult conversation with your spouse, and how to resolve the issue.
Overly Sensitive Spouse
What can you do when your spouse is highly sensitive to criticism? When you try to give constructive feedback they overreact.
Challenge
When one or both partners in a marriage have short fuses, they may tacitly agree to not say anything about most problems to prevent blow-ups. Issues have to be huge before they’re discussed.

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Here's what you'll find in our full Crucial Conversations summary :
- How to approach an argument without getting mad
- The mistakes most people make when trying to listen to someone else
- How to come up with win-win solutions that make everyone happy