Want to make Valentine’s Day special? Our relationships expert reveals the small, simple changes that can save your relationship… and the secret at the core of staying together

Forget about the UK and the US for now – because couples, never mind countries, are often separated by a common language.

What one person says is sometimes heard in a completely different way by the other; an innocuous remark can be taken as a personal slight. The resultant fallout can take hours or days to set right, but left to fester it can undermine and even end the best of relationships.

What is needed for a couple to thrive is a clear and direct channel of communication, one that is totally unambiguous – but that is often the hardest of all things to achieve.

That’s where Carmel Wynne steps in. Using her decades of experience as a couples counsellor and as a life coach, she has distilled everything she knows, everything she has learned in her almost 80 years on the planet, into Get Real! The Courage To Be Wrong And The Power To Change.

‘One of the things that I found working with couples over the years was that people don’t know how to ask for what they want,’ Carmel says. ‘Someone might say they want everyone in a relationship to be happy, but how will you know you’re happy? How will your partner know you’re happy? People sometimes don’t have the language to put on the kind of emotional experience they’re looking for.’

For some, this may seem counterintuitive. ‘Part of the reason I wrote my book is that we have so many beliefs that are flawed, in that there is a generalised idea out there that you’re not going to be fulfilled if you don’t have children,’ Carmel says.

‘That’s not true. A great friend of mine, his “children” are his books. We have an idea too that you need a partner to be happy. You don’t need a partner to be happy.’

Carmel was widowed 13 years ago after a long and happy marriage to Colm that produced four daughters, so it comes as a surprise to hear her say she was married three times – until the penny drops that it was to the same man, at different stages.

‘We had a brilliant two years before my daughter came along, and then I became a stay-at-home-mom, and then when they grew up, we became SKI parents, Spending the Kids’ Inheritance,’ she laughs. ‘We travelled all over the world.’

You might expect Carmel to lament the fact couples forget what is important in their relationships when children come along, so what follows is a surprise.

‘The child is the most important thing there, because you have sleepless nights and the child’s needs become a priority, and so your own needs fade into the background,’ she says.

‘When they go into college, it’s like you’re back being a couple again, without the ties you had with kids.

‘Each time the relationship is in difficulty, you work through that. My husband and I would say we never stopped working in our relationship. I came from a Catholic family, where my parents were very unhappily married. They should never have stayed together.

‘I was engaged twice before I got engaged to my husband, because I would come to the stage where I couldn’t visualise living with somebody forever.

‘Then my husband proposed to me and it was most unromantic. I was in a flat with rollers in my hair. He came early and asked would I marry him. And I said, “for God’s sake, why would you spoil a beautiful friendship?” What he said to me will give you a flavour of our marriage. He said to me, “if you marry me, we can have any kind of relationship we want, but you’re just going to have to work harder at it than me”.

‘He was right, because his parents were happily married. He had good modelling and I didn’t – so we actually had great communication. For me, that’s the key to a happy relationship.’

If there isn’t, you have two choices: to learn what the other person needs, or to accept that change is impossible.

‘I often bow to people who are divorced, that have the courage to say, this isn’t working for me, and who get out,’ Carmel says. ‘My heart breaks for the people where their marriages aren’t working. They’re living celibate lives. They’re not really getting on. Maybe they’re tied in for financial reasons.

‘It takes a lot of courage to get out of the marriage. This isn’t working, and more people should do it. I’m very clear, if you’re unhappy more often than you’re happy, that’s not a healthy place for you to be. Do something about it.’

It is, of course, very different at the start, but knowing the difference between love and lust is an art form in itself.

‘When you fall in love, literally your brain gets cramped,’ Carmel says. ‘You have that whole sense of somebody appreciating you, and seeing you at your very best and communicating that, probably non-verbally, so it’s an amazingly beautiful place to be, an enjoyable place to be.

‘But it doesn’t last, because when people are together over time, they have different needs. Little resentments come in. They don’t deal with them, and then something happens and the straw that breaks the camel’s back, they have a big row. Then you have a resentment and bitterness.’

Carmel cites a timely example.

‘When a couple have unrealistic expectations of where they’re going, what the night is going to be like, and it doesn’t meet them, then they end up disappointed,’ she says. ‘Take a couple who go out to celebrate Valentine’s Day. They’re two years married, they’re still in the throes of love. She’s pregnant, and they’re in that ideal place and everything is perfect. The ambience is right, the food is perfect, the music is great. So they decide, oh, we’re going to come back here next year.

‘When they come back, they’re measuring the experience against the experience of the previous year, which is really a fantasy that they have created in their head. It’s going to be found wanting, so they’re going to end up disappointed.’

The solution can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, Carmel maintains.

‘Sometimes, you have a man who thinks if he brings her to a particularly nice restaurant and pays a lot of money for it, she’d appreciate the gesture – where she would be happier to go for fish and chips in the local because she’s uncomfortable in the ambience of a very expensive restaurant.’

It all comes back to one thing.

‘Your relationships are as good as your communication,’ Carmel says. ‘Your communication is as good as your ability to articulate what you want and desire, and also what you say to yourself about having your needs met.

‘So much of the conflict that occurs in the relationship is people want something, and they assume, if you truly love me, you will give me this, but they don’t ask for it.

‘What’s really important is the meaning it has. What will his leaving the bins out do for you? What will her not leaving towels thrown around the bathroom do for you? Get that answer, then why is that important, and then you get what you want.’

Men are particularly maddened when a woman says she’s fine, even though she clearly isn’t.

‘The really interesting thing is that when somebody says, “I’m fine”, the other person isn’t even listening to the answer, because it means absolutely sweet damn all,’ Carmel says. ‘What you do in a situation like that is say you’re a bit concerned the other person isn’t looking so fine.

‘Most couples don’t resolve their issues, but they learn to compromise. A thing that drives my daughter mad is we’re going on about something, and I’ll say, “you’re right”, and I’ll pause and then say, “and I’m right too”.

‘So much of the fighting that people go on with is circular. They go into the same old routine. Children can tell you at what stage the mom will walk out and stand at the door, or the dad will punch his hand on the table, because couples have patterns to their rows. But if one partner changes even one thing, then the other partner has to change too.’

So, do we have the language to do that? ‘I think we do,’ Carmel concludes. ‘I actually think that if people are having the same kind of row, they would pause and say, “What do I want that I’m not getting? Why is that important? What will getting it do for me?” Those three questions bring a clarity of perception that leads to an accuracy of response.

‘Things go wrong when people have different languages.

‘If you’re needy and insecure and afraid to be yourself, to keep the other person sweet, you’re not being you.

‘There will always be insecurity. So it’s the measure that you love and accept yourself that you’re free to take in love from somebody else.’

Get Real! The Courage To Be Wrong And The Power To Change by Carmel Wynne is published by Mercier Press, priced €16.99