For many people, Valentine's Day is a time for candy, flowers and for couples to reflect on their relationships.
But it takes more than candy and flowers to make a relationship work, according to Cindy White, an associate professor in the University of Colorado at Boulder's communication department. The key to a good relationship, said White, is communication.
"When we talk about communication problems in intimate relationships lots of times what we are talking about are tensions that people are feeling," said White.
Tension, according to White, is the result of what communication experts refer to as the "dialectic experience" view of relationships. This view asserts that communication problems are categorized around three types of contradictions.
o Autonomy and connection: people wanting to have their own sense of who they are, being an individual and yet wanting to be connected to another person at the same time.
o Openness and closedness: people wanting to share things, wanting to feel like they could say anything to the other person and yet recognizing that in order to have a sense of privacy and to maintain who they are (as well as protect the other person's feelings), they can't be as open as they would like to be.
o Novelty and predictability: a desire to have a sense of what is going to happen, to know what the routine is while realizing you need things to be unique or different along the way.
Many communication problems are caused by these dialectical tensions, said White, and occur partly because there seems to be an unreasonable mindset where couples expect each other to know or sense what the other person wants instead of telling your partner what you expect from them.
"In our society, we have often come to believe that if you have to say what you want or need then, in fact, your partner isn't really doing their job," she said. "What the research suggests is that, in fact, people probably do better if they're able to what we call meta-communicate, which is talk about what they want and need from their partner."
Another typical communication issue between couples, she said, is recurring disagreements. When this happens then people are most likely experiencing one or more of these dialectical tension points, she explained.
"If a discussion is recurring, chances are it's about something other than what folks are talking about," said White.
For example, she said, if one person is always late and doesn't call their partner and the partner is upset about this but nothing changes, then that's probably a problem in the relationship that goes beyond the way they've been discussing it.
"In a dialectical view we would say it's probably reflecting some kind of underlying tension," said White. "Autonomy and connection: one person wants more individuality and separateness than the other individual."
On Valentine's Day, said White, couples should think about what has been central to their relationship and react accordingly. If things have been highly predictable, then novelty might be a good way to celebrate the relationship. If things have been stressful then do ritualized things like buying a card, some flowers and going to dinner to create an atmosphere of stability.