What Are You Saying?

What Are You Saying?

Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them.

Ephesians 4:29

A woman wore a wool jacket to work one day and decided to get her car washed on the way home. Since it had warmed up outside, she slipped her jacket off while she waited for the car to be cleaned. The next morning, her jacket was nowhere to be found. Maybe I left it at the car wash, she thought, and she called the number. “Did I leave a burgundy blazer there yesterday?” she asked the young man who answered. A minute later he returned from checking. “I’m sorry, Ma’am. There’s no burgundy Blazer here, just a gray Bronco.”

It’s just another in a long string of examples of how easy it is for miscommunication to occur. It happens all the time, especially in marriage. Men and women, as has been pointed out in numerous bestsellers, can communicate very differently—sometimes as if they were from different planets. A survey of more than a thousand married couples reported in U.S. News and World Report that in general, we don’t even talk about the same topics. The leading discussion subject reported for men was news events (talked about in the previous week by 71 percent of respondents), followed by work (68 percent). The study found that women, on the other hand, talked about food (76 percent) and health (72 percent). Men were more likely to have talked about sports (65 percent to women’s 42 percent); women were more likely to have discussed personal matters (52 percent to men’s 40 percent). Different conversational priorities can often lead to difficult communication.

Whatever the topic, however, we have one thing in common: both men and women depend on communication to keep their marital relationships running. It is the lifeblood of every marriage. Couples who can’t communicate well, who don’t speak clearly and listen carefully, soon fall apart.

So when was the last time the two of you talked about talking? Sounds strange, we know. But it’s important to monitor our communication status now and then, so consider how well you are doing at this important task. If you were to rate your effectiveness on a scale of one to ten, how well do you communicate as a couple? And why do you rank it at that level?

Another important question: how would you rate yourself when it comes to listening to your partner? Be honest and not defensive as you talk to each other about this. What seems to distract you most (your cell phone, for example) while you’re trying to have a conversation, and why? More importantly, what will you do to minimize the distraction? As Voltaire said, the road to the heart is the ear. Carefully listening to your partner is the quickest path to intimacy.

Good communication is stimulating as black coffee.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh