🔴 ASSERTIVITY: what does it mean in a couple? 

Some time ago, in an episode that you can find in my archive ( • 🔴 L'assertività nel la... , I talked about assertiveness in the professional field, but every day, in coaching sessions, listening to the As my clients talk about problems and misunderstandings within the couple, I realize that one of the most frequent causes of disagreements is the lack of assertiveness on the part of one or both partners.
Unfortunately, the assertive dimension is not frequented by everyone, also because the school system lacks the will to help students understand it and choose it as an intelligent basis on which to move in every relationship, to avoid misunderstandings, always maintaining behavior suited to the context and respectful of both themselves and others.
As Dale Carnegie said almost a hundred years ago, assertiveness is easier to recognize than describe, but let's try to give a definition, however narrow it may be: assertive ability consists in knowing how to express one's opinions with conviction, even when they are different from those of the interlocutor, consists in knowing how to communicate one's desires, one's discomforts within the relationship, always maintaining a respectful and adult tone and, finally, it is expressed in the ability to say those NO that many people are unable to pronounce.
When I find myself in the classroom with groups of people in front of me and I ask them if they have a clear idea of what assertiveness is, many confess to me that they don't know and I'm talking about a very heterogeneous audience in terms of age group, in fact I work both with very young high school students and with established adults in companies.
Some have a negative idea of it and equate it with manipulation, a concept that is extremely out of line; others consider it a lack of backbone and talk to me about a tendency to always follow other people's ideas, in a sort of "subservience", but I've really heard all sorts of things.
Today let's see together what it means to be assertive within a couple and I hope to be able to tell you how useful and functional it would be to be able to be so.
Good vision!