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iQuestions Faculty, Greg Smalley 
 
 
Question: 
 
I've been married for six years to a man I love with all my heart. We 
have a lot of trouble talking, yet we were great at it while dating. 
When we try to discuss a problem, we end up fighting and it gets us 
nowhere. 
 
Answer: 
 
How do we talk about serious issues inside our relationship, when at 
times it just feels like we kind of spin around and around and around? 
 
I know, for me personally, getting married—my dad is a marriage 
expert, and I had been traveling with him speaking—and I remember 
telling my wife, “Hey, don’t worry. We’re not going to be like those 
other people. We’re not going to have problems. Relax. Marriage is 
going to be a piece of cake.” 
 
Literally two years into my marriage, I really thought that we were one 
more argument away from my wife leaving me. You know, I didn’t 
think she would divorce me, I just didn’t think she wanted to be 
around me anymore. 
 
It was really the way that we tried to work through our differences. It 
seemed like when we were engaged, that we could talk through these 
things, but I don’t know what happened.  
 
But here’s the key. This is what I didn’t understand. We went in for 
counseling, and great counselors talked to us about communication, 
“How do we talk about the issue?” talking about love language, how do 
we understand what each other really needs, and how to meet those 
 
 
things? All really good things. But no one ever said, “Let’s talk about 
the core issue, the root. What is actually the root? What is driving your 
conflicts?” 
 
When we started to understand that, it literally changed our marriage.  
 
Here is actually the root of what’s going on inside of every conflict that 
a lot of times we never even talk about. No one’s told us this. It 
literally looks like this. I’m going to tell you a quick story, one from 
early on in my marriage. This is to illustrate that, again, this stuff was 
happening long before we got married. 
 
I was home alone one time. My wife’s a nurse, she’s working late at 
the hospital. I was bored, nothing going on around our apartment 
complex. I was sort of walking around our apartment, and I walked 
into the master bedroom area, and I remember thinking, “Something’s 
not right abut how Erin has this all arranged,” and something didn’t 
look right to me.  
 
So, I came up with a brilliant idea, because I was so bored anyway, 
“Let me just rearrange the whole room, and that will look great. As a 
matter of fact, I’ll surprise my wife. She’ll come home, she’ll love it. 
Who knows what will happen?” So I did it. I took the bed, moved it to 
a different corner in the room, took the shelves, just redid the whole 
thing, and stepped back, and said, “That looks great,” and I turned off 
the lights and went to bed. 
 
Literally, my poor wife comes home at about 1 o’clock in the morning, 
exhausted, just wants to get into her pajamas and go to bed. But, 
because we were newlyweds, she didn’t want to turn on any lights to 
wake me up. 
 
Now, all of us in the dark in our bedrooms, we know where to jump 
over, and where to scoot around and crawl under whatever is in our 
Smalley -2- 
 
 
way. So, I mean, she knew the obstacles and where they were, except 
that she didn’t have any idea that I had rearranged our bedroom. 
 
So, the first thing that she hit when coming in, she hit this little coffee 
table, and just went “bang!” right in the shin. That knocked her 
forward in the wall. She hits a pair of skis, some antique skis. They fall 
over, take out a shelf on the way down that had every one of her 
Precious Moment figurines that she had ever collected in her whole 
life. They crash to ground, and the skis fell over and hit the floor right 
next to me. BOOM!  
 
It wakes me up. What am I thinking? “We’re getting robbed!” So that 
whole fight-or-flight thing kicks in. I go to run out of the room, and I 
forget that I’ve moved our bed. I literally went BAM! right into the 
wall. Hit my nose, and I’m seeing stars.  
 
Well, Erin flipped on the light—and I’ll never forget this as long as I 
live—and she took one look at me, looked around the room and 
screamed, “Where am I?” You know, “What’s happened here?” 
 
And that’s when I said, “Surprise, Honey!”  
 
It wasn’t the kind of reaction I was looking for, because instantly she 
looked around and said, “This is horrible! What did you do? I hate it.” 
And something about the way that she said that hit me wrong. It’s like 
it pushed a button. I didn’t know to handle that. 
 
Then I said something back to her like, “What do you know? You’re not 
Martha Stewart!” and that hit button. 
 
And she shot back, “Besides, what kind of husband rearranges a 
bedroom, anyway?” 
 
Smalley -3- 
 
 
And so, we just started spinning around and around and around and 
realized that we were in the same dance that we’ve done for years and 
years and years.  
 
Now, looking back all those years of our marriage, I realized that what 
was going on that I didn’t understand that I now understand—and this 
is what I would encourage you to think about—every time you get into 
an argument with your spouse, what’s going on is you get your 
buttons pushed, those emotional buttons.  
 
You start to feel like a failure, feel unloved, or feel abandoned, or 
rejected, or not important, or worthless. And when our buttons get 
pushed, we’re going to react to people in the usual way that we 
react—maybe defend ourselves, go after them, get angry, argue, 
debate, whatever. Or we’re going to withdraw and kind of pull back.  
Either way, that usually then pushes our spouse’s button, they then 
react, and that’s the dance that get. I never understood that. 
 
So, my biggest encouragement to you is to notice what is actually 
going on down deep, and that’s is, we get our buttons pushed, and 
then we’re going to go into reaction mode.  
 
The greatest thing that you could do for your marriage in terms of how 
to discuss things, without getting into an argument, is to first and 
foremost pay attention to what are my buttons that just got pushed? 
 
Talk about the buttons. See, we didn’t know to do that. We just would 
focus on reactions or focus on the issue. We didn’t understand that 
underneath all of that, down deep, that our buttons got pushed. I can 
do something about my button. I can share that with my wife. 
Hopefully she will care about what I’m really feeling.  
 
Smalley -4- 
 
 
That’s the stuff that’s worth talking about. That’s the stuff that’s 
actually driving our conflict. If want to change how you communicate 
with your spouse, start talking about the buttons that get pushed. 
 
Smalley -5- 
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