Many hard conversations go wrong in the first few minutes, and the way they begin is something you can learn to change.

Many people know what it is like to carry an important conversation around all day. They work out what to say on the drive home and feel ready by the time their partner walks in. Then, within the first few seconds, the other person becomes defensive or goes quiet, and the conversation never reaches the part that mattered.

Often the trouble is in how the conversation started, because the opening sets the tone for what follows. Many couples open a hard topic with what Dr. Sytner often calls a “100-yard bomb,” everything that has been building for weeks delivered all at once. The content may be valid, but the delivery overwhelms the person receiving it, and they react to the force of it before they can take in what is being said.

Dr. John Gottman found that how a hard conversation begins strongly shapes how it ends. That finding is encouraging, because it means the opening of a conversation is worth planning, and a gentler opening is something couples can learn.

The guide gives you that gentler way in, with an opener that invites your partner into the conversation and a simple structure for the sentence that follows, worked through for five topics that many couples find especially hard to raise.

What’s inside

• Why the first minutes carry so much weight. What the research found about how conflict conversations begin, and why an abrupt start tends to backfire even when you are right.
• The invitation opener, a way to begin that gives your partner a moment to get ready before the topic arrives, and what to do if they say “not now.”
• A simple structure for the first sentence, along with the common mistakes that can let criticism slip back in, and how to avoid them.
• The structure worked through for five topics: money, in-laws, sex, parenting and time, each showing what tends to go wrong and what to say instead.
• Draft Your Startup, a one-page worksheet for writing your own opening line for a conversation you have been putting off, and checking it before you use it.
• A composite example of a couple whose weekends had gone quiet, including the first attempt that goes wrong and the second that holds.
• A one-page cheat sheet and one PDF that reads on a screen and prints clean at home.

Look inside

12-page PDF · fillable worksheet · fridge cheat sheet

The clinician behind Couples Conversations

Couples Conversations is the work of Dr. Ari Sytner, PhD, LCSW, a Certified Gottman Therapist, clinical professor at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, and author of the Couples Conversations™ book series. For many years he has worked with couples in therapy, and the Field Guides were created to answer a question that often follows a helpful article: “Okay, but what do I actually say?”

Each guide names the research it draws on and stays within what that research supports. The scripts are written in the plain, everyday words couples use with each other, so they feel natural to say. Each guide also picks up where its article leaves off, so that the ideas you may have read about become words you can use at home.

Questions