Are Your Social Skills Hurting Your Marriage? Fix Them Now

Poor social skills can keep your marriage down, but shifting to good social skills can take your marriage to the next level.

Everyone has some level of social skills.

Without them, we wouldn’t be able to function in society. Because success depends so much on the cooperation and assistance of other people, those with better social skills tend to be more successful.

Whether or not you feel like using good social skills, is another matter.

There is much that we have to do that we don’t particularly feel like doing—at least not all the time. Like being pleasant with our clients, even if we have a headache or our dog just ate our wallet.

If we only had good social skills with our friends, we would never make friends in the first place. And, if we don’t use good social skills with our spouse, even if our relationship is bad, then we prevent it from becoming better.

I’m hoping that you are motivated to good social skills with your spouse to make your relationship better—even in your husband or wife is not currently using good social skills with you. Like most things in life, the process of achieving success is often difficult, but once we achieve it we don’t regret doing the work. Relationship success is no different.

You might be wondering what are the most important social skills to use in marriage.

The answer is that the most important social skills in marriage are the same important social skills we use with everyone else.

Social skills involve being a good listener, saying things in a good way (both verbally and with our body language), managing differences gracefully, validating others, and having good boundaries. Social skills either help other people to like us or to respect us. Both liking and respect are important for relationships to be healthy.

Making a marriage better with social skills means getting better at:

• Listening in way that makes your spouse feel what he or she says is important to you.
• Saying things in a way that expresses love, care, and interest
• Making our spouse feel good, normal, and right through validation.
• Having confident, positive, and relaxed body language. And,
• Expressing boundaries in loving but firm ways,

These social skills all work together to both protect and maintain our marriage. If our relationship is already damaged, then we can start to use good social skills along with gradually increasing attraction and connection to rebuild our marriage.

When a couple meets for the first time, they are typically at their best in terms of using social skills. They are trying to get along, make a good impression, and are careful not to be offensive. They give compliments, they express appreciation, they listen with smiles and nods. It does take some effort to do that for people who are not naturally like that, but it can pay off in terms of getting a much better catch than could be had by being obnoxious and rude.

Once relationships become committed, people drift back to their baseline behavior.

This is fine, as long as their baseline behavior provides enough appreciation and validation. For some people, their baseline behavior does not include good listening, validation, appreciation, or compliments. This makes them less enjoyable as time goes on. Many people who are good at new relationships, but bad at long term relationships have this problem.

Let’s put this in a different perspective. Imagine a who always showered and using deodorant before marriage and then stopped taking showers and deodorant after marriage (unless they were meeting someone other than their spouse). Their spouse would feel less important, not worth the effort of taking showers or using deodorant. Using social skill with everyone except your spouse is just like this.

Although I can understand wanting to just be who we are, without making any effort, that can only truly be done by people who live alone, and only while at home.

The fact is, all relationships are work, which means they have job requirements.

And, if we don’t do those requirements, we won’t get a payoff of the love and affection that we desire. Not only that, but we are likely to be fired and replaced.

Making friends is work. Keeping friends is work. Finding someone to love is work. Keeping that love alive is work. The more your spouse has to give you love handouts that you didn’t earn, the more resentful your spouse will become.

Some people have naturally good social skills that come easily for them and feel almost effortless to maintain. Others need to stop old habits and practice new social skills every day until they become just as easy, and more rewarding, than the old habits. Using more social skills or new social skills, like all change, will not feel natural.

Nothing new ever feels natural.

Being your natural self got you to where you are now. If all is well, then I agree with you that you have no reason to change. If things are not well, then you need to choose between being your natural self and creating a better natural self. As a coach, my business is helping people to make changes that feel unnatural until they experience success in their marriage. Then, they can have a new natural that is better than the old one.

The common social skills mistakes that people make include:

• Half-listening, showing disinterest, and interrupting, all of which signal to our spouse that what they say, think, and believe is not important to us. It makes our spouses feel unimportant to us.
  • The remedy: We need to be good listeners even when what our spouse is saying is not interesting to us.
• Speaking with a harsh voice, being all business, lacking in validation, and without saying things in a way that will help our spouse to enjoy us as people and not just as partners.
  • The remedy: We need to talk not just to provide information or to express ourselves, but to interest our spouse and to create enjoyable interactions.
• Body language and tone of voice which shows disinterest or antipathy toward our spouse.
  • The remedy: The more we can love and appreciate our spouse in our heart, the more our body language will fall in line, just like when we were first dating.
• Challenging differences when they don’t really matter and failing to validate differences even when they do matter. This will make us come across as harsh, punitive, and controlling.
  • The remedy: We need to be able to agree and empathize in the midst of differences. We must make our spouses feel loved, even when we don’t like their behavior or have to use boundaries.
• Failing to resolve conflicts with peaceful and fair methods.
  • The remedy: We have to use good problem solving methods to work through differences and create win-win outcomes. When that is not possible, we need to have a way to compromise without needing to fight first. If all else fails, then we use good boundaries. There never comes a time for arguing.

Arguing does not add anything good to the problem-solving process. In Connecting through “Yes!,” my book on agreeing, I have a chapter on problem solving.

If these social skills mistakes strike close to home, don’t despair. It is never too late to improve your relationship. Even in the worst of relationships, good social skills won’t be rejected, provided you don’t change overnight. Overnight changes are suspicious, and feel like pursuit or manipulation.

The skills to start working on first are the ones that don’t involve talking.

If your relationship is already strained, your spouse is likely to reject attempts at conversation, even if you are saying things in a good way. Then you are likely to feel frustrated.

Instead, work on good listening skills as well as looking relaxed and approachable. When your husband or wife looks at you, he or she should not have the feeling that something is bothering you. They will if you don’t use relaxed body language, When you look stressed—even if it has nothing to do with your spouse, your spouse is likely to think it does.

Looking stressed says, “something’s wrong, I’m uncomfortable being around you, you are doing something I don’t like, and if you talk to me, it’s not going to be pleasant.” The best way to deal with looking stressed is to deal with your stress. Praying, reading the Bible, having a plan A and a plan B will go a long way toward that. There are many other ways to deal with stress as well. Find at least three that work and do all three.

Good social skills like these will make your other efforts at being desirable have greater impact.

It’s really hard to become more desirable while coming across as stressed, unfriendly, disinterested, and oppositional.

Your spouse has to relax around you before he or she can enjoy even small talk with you. And small talk comes before talking like a friend. That won’t happen unless you are handling the small talk with listening and validation.

Good small talk is the gateway to a closer relationship.

Don’t bring up topics your spouse is not interested in, but be sure to be interested in his or her topics. These requirements never change. They are the same in your first year of marriage as in your 25th. Don’t let any potholes or gaps develop in your marriage social skills.

Filling in gaps in social skills is a common part of marriage coaching since they help a rejecting spouse to feel more relaxed, develop trust, and shift to being more positive about the relationship.

A common example of this is when a spouse is saying he or she does not feel in love anymore and isn’t sure about remaining in the marriage. The natural tendency in such a situation is to become defensive, argumentative, invalidating, and to pressure a spouse to work on the relationship. That never helps.

Case example of using social skills to improve a marriage

A case in point is Marcos, one of my clients who had done all these things, and was continuing to do them, despite his wife wanting less and less to do with him. I helped Marcos to think about how he would feel if he was disinterested in someone and they just continued to pressure and argue. Would that make him more interested on that person?

Considering that question helped Marcos to understand why his wife was further repelled by his behavior and why their relationship was getting worse, despite the good changes he was trying to make. Marcos needed to consider what behavior would help his wife to feel more relaxed around him rather than needing to escape him. And how could he interact with her in a way that would complement the changes he was making to be more desirable?

With a little guidance, Marcos realized that behaviors like being relaxed, friendly, and agreeable, without any pursuit or argument, would help his wife be more at ease.

I helped him to focus on continuing to be a good listener and taught him how to validate his wife without any pursuit at all. The goal was not to make her feel in love in one step, but to gradually work through relationship building steps that would feel natural to his wife.

Because these changes helped Marcos to have some quick improvement, it encouraged him to continue to build his relationship with his wife in a step-wise fashion. Getting to just having enjoyable talks together was seen as a victory, even if his wife was still far from being in love with him, but it was a step closer.

How you can use this information to improve your marriage

If you want to have success like Marcos, you need to determine your goal, but then focus on the steps for getting there, one-by-one. It’s much easier to put on one sock at a time. It is also faster. Try it and see.

Let me give you some recommendations for enhancing your marriage with social skills. I recommend you start by reading over a list of social skills or take the social skills quiz on my website. Doing this will help you to identify which skills you most need to work on. If you are already good at all the social skills, that will be good to know, too.

As with everything else, don’t ask your spouse about your social skills, and don’t tell your spouse you are working on social skills.

Pointing out changes is not helpful for relationship building.

What is helpful is to gradually change in ways that help your spouse to enjoy your relationship more, without his or her really being able to say why. Then the change in his or her feelings will seem more natural and work better for creating emotional connection. Telling people you are using a pimple concealer will not help you to be more attractive.

Working on social skills will not fix all the problems in your relationship. However, they will help you to build or reconcile more easily with the other changes that you are making. Work on having a healthy mindset along with your social skills development. I recommend you work on prioritizing your relationship with God first, spouse second, children third, and then others. This matches what the Bible teaches us and will help you to have a healthier and happier life.

Eliminate false beliefs that keep you down

The idea that you have to love yourself before you can love others is a social lie which is counter to what the Bible teaches. It is loving God and others which will help you feel better about yourself. In the words of Jesus:

“ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”—Matthew 22:37-40, NIV.

You will never feel bad about loving your spouse, but you will feel bad if you don’t.

And eventually you will have regrets if you could have loved more and didn’t. All of my clients have this regret when faced with their spouse’s rejection.

Love isn’t just a feeling, it’s also doing what makes your spouse feel loved. Part of that is using good social skills with your spouse more than with anyone else.

Learn more about social skills and relationships: Flora, J., & Segrin, C. (1999). Social Skills are Associated with Satisfaction in Close Relationships. Psychological Reports, 84(3), 803-804. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1999.84.3.803 (Original work published 1999)