1,500 happily married people say the key to lasting relationships isn’t communication - it’s respect

'Communication is overrated'

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

When author and blogger Mark Manson was about to get married, he reached out for some advice. He didn't ask friends or family but instead called upon his considerable readership.

You can read Manson's full post - “1,500 people give all the relationship advice you'll ever need” - on his blog.

Mark Manson: People who were happily married for 20-plus years - all of them said communication's overrated; it's all about respect.

I'm a blogger and author. I've been blogging for nine years.

When Mark was about to get married, he asked some of his happily married readers what lessons they could share. More than 1,500 people responded.

I see this as crowdsourcing human wisdom.

He also asked the divorced to explain what went wrong.

Me and my assistant started to notice after about 500 emails, most of the people who talked about their divorce focused on communication. They basically said communication is the problem and the thing you need to fix is communication.

The people who were happily married for 20-plus years - all of them said communication's overrated; it's all about respect.

Basically, the argument was, if you're going to spend decades with a person you're going to miscommunicate, you're going to misunderstand each other, you're going to have situations where you don't get where the other person is coming from or you make the wrong assumptions.

This is just normal. If you spend enough time with anybody it happens all the time.

So they said, what's actually more important is having base-level respect. So that even when you misunderstand the person, you don't assume that they're like this awful, horrible person for disagreeing with you. You respect their differences. You respect that they may see things differently.

Or you respect that they disagree with you, or have a problem that you don't understand.

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