or shapes a relationship. Whatever married people say or do in relation to each other either increases or decreases their level of intimacy. They craft their relationship glance-by-glance, word-by-word, and sentence-by-sentence. From a spiritual vantage point, everything they say or do makes them either more, or less, like Christ.
If, over the months and years, they learn to live together and gradually come to share a common consciousness (see Mark 10:9 and Matt 19:6)—if their marriage doesn’t deteriorate into make-believe—they will increasingly feel complete in each other’s company and incomplete when they’re apart. Regardless of how independent or resourceful they are as individuals, or how high-powered as members of society, they will long to be with each other.
Spouses may, of course, fail to grow closer. Long before anyone would call their union make-believe, they may become hostile or aggressive.17 Or, often worse, they may simply avoid each other, finding it unpleasant even to be in the same room.
Active Listening: Communicating That You Understand
In any discussion of communication, especially within marriage, it’s important to highlight the value of what has been called Active Listening.18 This consists of saying back to the other person the essence of what you’ve just heard.
Active listening is not parroting. A recording device could do that as well if not better. It is gently leading the other person, in this case your spouse, more deeply into his or her experience. This is accomplished by restating the core message in what you’ve heard.
When you listen actively rather than trying to figure out what you’re going to say next, it conveys that you care. Rather than offering your opinion on whether what your spouse has said is good or bad, you restate its central meaning. You also refrain from making the disastrous mistake of telling your husband or wife, “there’s no reason to feel that way.” Telling someone what they should or shouldn’t feel is massively insensitive and is certain to imply that you’re missing the point: this is how your spouse does feel. If he or she is giving you the gift of opening up, honor that gift with attentiveness rather than admonition or advice. Your job in a marriage is not to be a strategic consultant.
At least two benefits come from listening actively. First, it keeps the focus on the other person. We all have a strong in-built tendency to turn the focus on us, and what we’re thinking and feeling. Keeping the focus on your spouse without disrupting it is more difficult than you might suppose.19
People want to make better sense of their lives, of what they think and feel, and a big step toward doing this can be to talk it out with someone else. The best natural therapist for any married person is a spouse who cares enough to listen. Many times, when I worked as a therapist, people would say, in one way or another, finally someone understands me. Mostly, all I had to do was be with the person, listen carefully, and not rush in to fix things. Paying attention to your spouse is more important than returning a phone call or getting back to the game on TV.
Second, active listening keeps you reaching out to your spouse. Rather than becoming defensive, it moves you in the direction of empathy. No one is inclined to be empathic in the middle of an argument, which is when we’re most prone to want to justify ourselves. This is what makes empathic listening at such times enormously powerful.
Nearly everyone wants to tell his or her story, and to feel like someone else, in this case you, got it. Here are four principles for active listening within marriage:
1. Focus on what your spouse is communicating. Pay attention to gestures and expressions as well as to words and phrases. Stay tuned in to the other person, even if you feel like you’re being attacked. This, as noted above, is not easy to do. And, for the record, it’s no easier for a psychologist. We’re all cut from the same imperfect human cloth, with the same self-centered needs.
2. Refrain from offering advice or solutions—just listen. Men in particular find making suggestions almost irresistible, and some women do also. Not long ago, a man told me that it took him years to figure out that when his wife surfaced an issue or problem, this was not the time for him to make recommendations and in five minutes be done with the matter. It was, rather, the time she needed him to listen, which might take forty-five minutes. If you are inclined to act like a management consultant to your husband or wife, don’t. It’s often the exact opposite of what’s needed, like giving someone coffee to treat insomnia.
3. Say it back in different words. The key, here, is to see if you can verbally capture the emotional significance of what your husband or wife is communicating. Your spouse might say for example, “I feel like everything’s caving in on me, like it’s coming at me all at once.” To this you might reflect, “It feels overwhelming,” and then wait for your spouse to continue. Try to avoid falling back on stock phrases or clichés, which because of their superficiality may leave your husband or wife feeling worse than if you’d said nothing. The idea is to listen closely for what the other person is feeling. This might mean that you have to pause before responding. It may also mean that it would be prudent to ask, “How do you mean?” or “Say a little more about that, so I can better understand.” It’s almost always better to ask how do you mean than what do you mean, since the former tends to elicit more depth and detail, while the latter tends only to prompt the other person to repeat the same words.
4. Confirm your understanding. Ask if you’ve “got it,” perhaps in just those words. This is so simple to do that you might think that nearly everyone does it. Not so. People rarely check to make sure they understand what another person means. The best way to ensure that you understand is to say it back (#3 above), and then ask if what you said was accurate. If you don’t ask for confirmation and, if necessary, correction, the two of you could end up using the same words but meaning entirely different things.
Reports and Commands
Scholars who study language sometimes point out that every communication is a report and a command, an item of information and an instruction. Although this may not always be the case, it is an insightful and provocative observation, one worth keeping in mind as it applies to suggestions and questions.
Imagine that your friend or spouse says, “I think we should go to the movies.” This could mean anything from “I’m bored and would like some diversion” through “I want you to consider my plan for the evening” to “We’re going!”
Here’s another example. Your friend says, “Don’t you think War and Peace is a wonderful book?” This is likely to mean, “You should like it too.” The “don’t you think” part is what members of the legal profession would call leading the witness.
Once you see this two-pronged nature of suggestions and questions, you will be more alert to the unvoiced commands embedded within them. This is not to say that such commands are sinister. They can be quite helpful, in that they provide social cues by conveying what the other person wants or expects. You don’t necessarily have to comply, but it’s useful to know what’s being asked or demanded.
It is generally better in any marriage to make requests as opposed to demands, to err on the side of maximizing your spouse’s freedom. It is worth noting, however, that freedom is not always the license to do what we want. Sometimes, it’s the chance to do what we ought. When Christians enter into marriage, they vow to accept certain limits in those regions of life that have to do with emotional intimacy and sexual fidelity. Yet, apart from such sacred domains, the more freedom we give our spouses, the better. And, the more freedom we grant them, the more likely they will be to prove worthy of it.
Saying and Doing
It
