It had to have been the early 2000s. My bride and I were sitting in a church auditorium listening to Kevin Leman speak, and the phrase he kept using made me chuckle every time I heard it: drive-through talking. I kept mistakenly calling it drive-by talking in my head — which, as I’d later realize, is an entirely different communication style and not one anybody recommends.
But the drive-through? That one I knew well.
In my younger years, my wife and I ate out constantly. There was a Taco Bell just down the street, and we learned a small but important truth at that pickup window: when the kid on the headset repeated our order back to us, we got what we ordered. When they didn’t repeat it back, the odds of getting something we hadn’t asked for went way up.
Marriage works the same way. The window is just invisible, and the cost of getting the order wrong is much higher.
The Technique
When your spouse is talking and you’re listening, act like you’re at the drive-through window. Repeat the order back. Make sure they know you actually heard the words they said — not the version your brain rewrote on the way in.
We’ve been doing this for over twenty years. It usually sounds something like, “Hold on — I think this is what you’re saying. Do I have it right?”
Over time, four phrases have done most of the heavy lifting:
- Can you repeat that, please?
- Do I have this right?
- Is this what you said?
- Help me understand.
That last one is the one I have to be careful with.
“Help Me Understand”
When I say it, I mean it the way it’s supposed to be meant: I’m being dense, I’m missing context, I need more from you so I can actually track what you’re telling me. It’s me admitting I’m the bottleneck.
That phrase has a problem. It can land as “you’re being too vague — explain it better,” which puts the work back on the person already doing the talking. Same words. Different posture. Completely different effect.
I’ve had to work at making sure my tone matches my intent on that one.
What the Research Says
Charles Duhigg points to research on couples who argued differently — specifically, on what separated couples who stayed together from couples who fell apart, based on how they fought.
The pattern is uncomfortable in its simplicity. Couples who focused on controlling the other person tended to end up divorced. Couples who focused on self-control — managing their own reactions, taking responsibility for their own part — tended to end up still married, and happier in the marriage they were still in.
That’s not abstract to me. It’s been my goal for twenty-seven years — to be the husband who’s regulating himself, not the one trying to manage her. Drive-through talking is what that goal looks like in practice. You’re not trying to win the conversation. You’re not trying to control where it goes. You’re regulating yourself long enough to clarify, repeat, and confirm — so that the other person actually feels heard.
I also use this with my son, too. Testosterone gets in the way more often than I’d like to admit, on both sides of those conversations. But the same courtesy I extend to a stranger at a checkout counter is the courtesy I want to extend to him — and even more to him and to my wife than to anyone else.
He and his mother shouldn’t get the worst version of how I communicate just because they’re the most familiar.
The Pushback
Someone might tell me their marriage is fine without all this work. That they don’t need techniques. That things are good.
I’d push back. “Fine” is an invitation. Just because something is good doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better. Just because things work okay right now doesn’t mean they can’t fail later. The roof you don’t maintain is the roof that fails in the storm — not on the sunny day you decided it was fine.
I’ve never wanted to be over-prescriptive about this. I’m not a counselor. I’m a husband who’s been married a long time and has paid attention. My belief is this: because we’re friends, because we have the mutual aim of respecting each other, taking care of each other, honoring the vows we made — we can work through things. Not because the technique is magic. Because we love each other, and we choose to be married to each other, every day.
The drive-through window just helps us hear each other while we’re choosing.
David Willis 