How to Talk to Your Husband (or wife)

I earned my Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Counseling and I’ve been married for over a decade.  I wish I could tell you that both my education and my experience as a married man make my communication attempts seamless, effective and 100% clear all the time.  I wish I could say that communicating with my wife is one of those things I do so naturally and so comfortably that I literally have to be careful to not shift to autopilot.  However, nothing could be further from the truth.  Communicating with another human being is tough work!

When a couple first get together, they are both aware that even though there is an initial attraction, chemistry will have to take over if the relationship is going to move forward at all.  As a result, in the beginning stages of their dating, couples tend to be more intentional at asking questions and genuinely working on communicating with each other; however, as the relationship progresses, a greater sense of comfortability sets in.  Through this process, the quality of communication often deteriorates leaving the couple susceptible to unhealthy habits like mind-reading, interrupting each other, misinterpreting body language and assuming what the other person is going to say or what they really meant.

Tone of voice and body language–a dismissive shrug, a raised eyebrow–can turn a seemingly inoffensive statement into a nasty dig. For instance, a husband who asks his wife, “is this a new recipe?” could be suggesting that she’s outdone herself in the kitchen and he loves her food–or that she’s out of her league and should stick to tried-and-true dishes. It all depends on how he says it.

Stephen Young, president of Insight Education Systems in Montclair, New Jersey, has made a career out of studying the hidden messages we send even when the words we use are innocuous. If these micromessages, as he calls them, seem negative, they must be brought out into the open. In the example above, the wife needs to find out what the husband is implying, according to Young: “Then she can deal with it. Once she makes him aware of the micromessages he’s sending, either the relationship will go up or it will go down.” In other words, if the husband’s response makes the wife feel bad, she knows she’s in for a bigger conversation.

Hidden messages. By: Brodman, Janet, Good Housekeeping, 0017209X, Apr2006, Vol. 242, Issue 4

Over the years, I’ve studied patterns of effective communication in multiple relationship settings: husband and wife, master and pet, boss and employees, salesman to potential customers; the result has been a set of behaviors that I have come to arrange in the S.H.O.W. U.P. acronym.

S.H.O.W. U.P. highlights six communication principles that are present in healthy relationships.  Mutual respect and overall partner responsiveness are the goal of this technique.  Because I want to give each point the emphasis it deserves, I will be posting each of them in separate blog posts in the next few days.  By the way, if you have not subscribed to my blog, be sure to do it today either via e-mail or rss feed.

Copyright © 2009 Cesar G. Gamez, MA., All Rights Reserved

Related posts:

1. Can You Tell Him/Her What You Really Think?
2. Cheaters: Do You Know The Signs of Infidelity?
3. Cheaters: Why Affairs Happen