This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at JMU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

It has recently come to my attention that a lot of people do not fully understand what good, open, and honest communication is. Whether it is your four month long situationship ghosting you, walking on eggshells around your roommate, or misconstruing something someone said, I have noticed that people seem to be understanding each other less and less. Now, this could be a personal issue of mine but I don’t fully believe it to be. I am not sure if it is because of COVID or “that dang phone” to quote my mom, but our generation seems to be having a harder time holding conversations and simply understanding what people truly mean when they say certain things. In the past three months I, myself have gotten into some interesting situations, to say the least, and most of these wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for a little communication.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this so much might have to do with the amount of group projects I have been doing in the past few weeks. Being forced to collaborate with people I don’t know has always made me stressed and feel a little uneasy. I have done three group projects recently and two of them went very well, while the other fell flat. When reflecting on these groups, I’ve realized why.

The older we get, the more expectations are placed on us. We have to be able to express our needs in ways we might not have experienced before, and the way that we do this is through communication. Also, I’m not sure if it is just me, but we all seem to be so focused on ourselves that we don’t fully understand the repercussions of our actions.

In the two groups that I worked well with, we all collectively set goals and expectations that we agreed to hold each other to. With the third, let’s just say that didn’t happen, and it definitely negatively impacted us.

Now, I know you can’t make a contract for you and your friend or partner to sign when you get into a relationship but you have to admit, it might make life a little easier. Openly talking about your feelings can be very daunting, and sometimes it is easier to fully avoid situations than to speak up. I highly encourage you not to do this, which is highly hypocritical of me to say given that I am currently doing just that.

I guess my point in writing this is to remind people that they aren’t alone if their relationships are having communication issues. We all just need to find ways of making sure we are being our honest selves and that people can be the same with us.

A Miscommunication Epidemic?

We wanna slide into your DMs