There’s a sentence a lot of us think but never say out loud. Not to a friend, not to family, not even to ourselves alone in the car. We think it, then push it away and go back to being hopeful and patient. “It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be okay.”
The sentence is this: “I don’t think they’re going to change.”
We don’t say it out loud because the moment we do, we feel like we have to do something about it. So we keep it quiet. And almost nobody talks about this part, which is exactly why I want to.
Here’s something worth sitting with. Research on relationship conflict says about 69% of our conflicts are perpetual problems. Same challenge, coming back around and around for us to solve. Happy couples have these too. The difference between happy and unhappy couples isn’t that one group ran out of problems. It’s the skills they’ve practiced to move through the problems that keep showing up. So if you feel stuck in the same fight on repeat, you’re not broken and you’re not a failure at relationships. You just haven’t been handed the right tools yet.
A couple weeks ago on Love Shack Live we asked whether you’re an assumer or an asker. Most of us are assumers. We don’t speak up, and when we do, it often comes out as blame or complaint rather than a clear ask. So we worked on the asking. Get specific about what you need. Use your voice. Ask for it.
This week we picked up the question that comes right after: what happens when you finally do all of that, you ask clearly, you ask more than once, and nothing changes?
The story your brain tells you
When we ask and nothing moves, our brains go to work fast, and they’re not kind. The story usually sounds like this: “They don’t care. This relationship doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. If I mattered more, they’d just do the thing I asked.”
Here’s the part that makes it sting more. When we’re new to asking, we don’t ask for the whole enchilada. We ask for the smallest thing we think we can actually get. So when even that small thing doesn’t happen, it feels enormous. “If you can’t give me this tiny thing, what does that say about everything else?”
I’m not mocking this. I’ve done it. Tom’s done it. Brooke’s done it. Falling into that rabbit hole is one of the most human things there is, and it happens in every relationship I’ve ever seen.
But before you decide what the no means, I want to offer something. Asking gives you clarity, not control.
When you ask for something specific, you get a pop of validation inside yourself. Your whole system goes, “Yes, that’s it, that’s the thing I need.” And your ask gives your partner clarity too. Now they know what works for you and what doesn’t. That’s the whole job of the ask. What it does not do is hand you control over another person. Asking is not a vending machine. You don’t put the request in and watch the result drop out the bottom. A clear ask is a real win on its own, even when the answer is no.
So when you get that no, slow down before the story takes over. There are reasons a partner doesn’t change that have nothing to do with not caring about you. Here are four of them.
Four reasons your partner may not be changing
They don’t understand. You laid it out, you explained it, and it still didn’t land. The ask is rarely as clear as it feels in our own heads. We do an exercise in live workshops where we hold up a picture of something simple, like an umbrella, and ask 50 people what it brings up for them. I’ve never once gotten the same answer twice. One person thinks of the apple tree in their backyard. Another thinks of playing in the rain as a kid. That’s one inanimate object. Now imagine a loaded, emotional request running through your partner’s whole history of beliefs and experiences. Communication is clunky. The fix usually isn’t repeating yourself louder, which, let’s be honest, is exactly what we do. It’s getting curious. “What did you hear me say? Where are we missing each other?”
They don’t know how. This one I see constantly. The person asking is often someone who can translate their thoughts and feelings into words easily, so they assume everyone can. They can’t. For a lot of people, going inside, finding the feeling, and putting it into a sentence is a skill they’ve never practiced. So when you ask them to “just tell me how you feel,” and they go quiet or shut down, you read it as a withhold. They don’t care, they think it’s stupid, they don’t love me enough. Meanwhile they’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t know how to do this, and I’m embarrassed to say so.” That’s not refusal. That’s not having the skill yet.
They don’t agree. Sometimes they hear you, they understand you completely, and they just don’t agree. And saying “I don’t agree” out loud opens a whole conversation that, if they’re already emotionally spent for the day, they don’t want to start. So instead you get, “What? Sorry, I can’t hear you right now, let’s talk later.” We’re very good at kindly dodging the thing we don’t want to say. Often a disagreement is really about different priorities or different ideas about how to solve the problem. And when we can actually put both sets of ideas on the table, we tend to land somewhere better than either of us would have alone.
They don’t have the emotional capacity. This is real, and we don’t give it enough weight. Burnout, stress, anxiety, depression, addiction. When someone is using everything they’ve got just to keep themselves upright and get through the day, they don’t have much left over to take on your needs too. We understand this instantly when it’s physical. If someone were sick and needed to rest, we’d get it. Emotional capacity works the same way, we just can’t see it.
Caring, capability, and capacity are three different things, and we collapse them all into “they don’t care.” They’re not the same, and the difference matters.
A different question to bring instead
Here’s where I want to take the pressure off the goal. The goal of communication isn’t to win, or to gather evidence about who dropped the ball. The goal is understanding. Mine of myself, and then mine of you.
So instead of asking how do I make them change, or how do I explain this better so they finally get it, try a different question: what do I need to understand about your perspective before I decide what your behavior means?
And there’s an ask that goes with it, one I love because it’s an invitation rather than an interrogation:
“Would you be willing to share with me what comes up for you when I ask you for this? I’d genuinely like to understand you better. Is that something you’d be willing to do with me?”
That last line matters. Being invited feels completely different from being summoned. Think about how it feels to get “you’d better be there on time” versus opening a real invitation in the mail. Same information, opposite experience. When you genuinely invite your partner into the conversation, you create the conditions where the conversation can actually happen.
What about the harder cases
On the episode, a listener asked about her partner’s drinking. The same conversation she no longer wants to have. Does she accept it and focus on herself, or keep trying to help him be present and healthy?
We didn’t hand her a tidy answer, because it’s hers to sort out. But a few things are worth saying. Addiction shrinks emotional capacity to almost nothing, because so much of it goes to managing the internal experience that drives the drinking in the first place. There’s usually a lot of guilt and shame underneath, not indifference. Asking someone to simply stop rarely works, because there’s a reason the behavior is there. Getting real support, and getting everything out on the table, comes before any plan.
And the part people skip: being the partner or family member of someone who’s struggling takes an enormous amount of emotional capacity too. So yes, go to the gym. Keep yourself as healthy as you can, mentally and physically, whether you stay or go. Leaving will ask a lot of you. So will staying. Either way, you’re going to need more resolve than you have right now, and building it is the work in front of you.
Where to start
You can’t care or sacrifice your way into saving someone. What you can do is tell the truth about what you’re seeing, get curious about what’s underneath, and keep building your own skills.
If you want a place to begin, take the Better Love Quiz. It’s about 10 minutes and it shows you which of four relationship skills is costing you the most right now. You can find it at betterlovequiz.com.
Love isn’t enough, but skills are. Learn them, practice them, live them.
Listen to the full conversation on Love Shack Live with Staci Bartley, Tom, and Brooke.
