Marriage Today
- By Michael Maher
- •
- 05 Nov, 2018
- •
Skills for Making Your Marriage Thrive

Any marriage counselor will tell you that one of the most common problems observed when couples come for help is communication skills. People get into trouble in their marriages because they have not developed their ability to listen and communicate.
Barriers to Communication
These are a few of the things that prevent people from
communicating effectively:
- Not
knowing how to communicate properly
- Not
taking the time to think through what you want to say
- Not
taking the time to anticipate what your partner might be thinking and feeling
- Fear
of revealing too much of yourself
- Fear
of your partner's anger
- Not
wanting to hurt your partner's feelings
Empathy and Acceptance
People marry because they want to spend the rest of their lives with their partner. They have every hope of growing together and creating a relationship that makes them feel emotionally healthy. Two factors that are necessary for this to happen are empathy and acceptance on the part of both partners.
Empathy is the capacity to put oneself in another's shoes and understand how they view their reality, how they feel about things.
Demonstrating empathy and acceptance is critical to maintaining a strong relationship. Let's look next at some communication skills that enable you to create a climate of empathy, acceptance, and understanding. First we will explore a skill called Active Listening.
Active Listening
Active listening is a way of communicating that creates the important climate of empathy, acceptance, and understanding.
- It is a two-step response to a statement made by your
partner.
- It includes reflecting back what emotion you detected
in the statement, and the reason for the emotion.
This is what active listening sounds like:
"Sounds like you're upset about what happened at work."
"You're very annoyed by my lateness, aren't you?"
Why Active Listening Is a Valuable Skill
Active listening is a valuable skill because it demonstrates that you understand what your partner is saying and how he or she is feeling about it.
- Active listening means restating, in your own words,
what the other person has said.
- It's a check on whether your understanding is correct.
- It demonstrates that you are listening and that you are
interested and concerned.
Actively listening does not mean agreeing with the other person. The point is to demonstrate to your partner that you intend to hear and understand his or her point of view. This is good for your relationship for several reasons:
- When someone demonstrates that they want to understand
what you are thinking and feeling, it feels good.
- It creates good feelings about the other person.
- Restating and checking understanding promotes better
communication and fewer misunderstandings.
More Active Listening Examples
Here are some more examples of active listening:
"You sound really stumped about how to solve this problem. "
"It makes you angry when you find errors on Joey's homework."
"Sounds like you're really worried about Wendy."
"I get the feeling you're awfully busy right now."
More Communication Skills
Although our space is limited in this short newsletter, there are a few more communication skills that I must mention. These include asking open-ended questions, making summary statements to check understanding, and encouraging your partner to open up and elaborate by using neutral questions and phrases. Open-ended questions begin with what, why, how do, or tell me.
- These
questions get the other person to open up and elaborate on the topic.
- Asking
these kinds of questions gets the other person involved by giving him or her a
chance to tell what he or she thinks or knows.
- These
questions are designed to encourage your partner to talk.
- They
are useful when the other person is silent or reluctant to elaborate.
- They
are also useful in dealing with negative emotions (such as anger or fear),
since they help encourage the other person to vent feelings.
Summary Statements
Summary statements sum up what you hear your partner saying.
- A summary statement enhances your partner's self-esteem
by showing that you were listening carefully.
- It also helps you focus on facts, not emotions.
- It helps your partner clarify his or her own thinking
by hearing your summary.
- Summary statements also help you deal with multiple
disagreements so you can deal with them one by one.
- They help eliminate confusion by focusing on the
relevant facts.
- Summary statements also help you separate the important
issues from the trivial.
Neutral Questions and Phrases
Neutral questions and phrases get your partner to open up and elaborate on the topic you are discussing.
- These
questions are more focused than open-ended questions.
- They
help your partner understand what you are interested in hearing more about.
- They
further communication because they help you gain more information.
- When
you ask these kinds of questions, you demonstrate to your partner that you are
interested and that you are listening.
Business Skills for Marriages
You might be surprised to hear that the same skills that help people succeed in business can also be used to build a better marriage. Like any business, a marriage is a partnership of people. Many of the skills that make businesses run successfully—planning, organizing, and setting goals—also can be applied to running your marriage successfully. These are some of the skills that will strengthen any marriage:
- Create
an overall vision of what you want your life to be like; consider all life
areas.
- Develop
a long-range strategy.
- Set
short-term and long-term goals.
- Plan
the steps that will help you accomplish your goals.
- Organize
projects.
- Manage
projects.
- Manage
people.
- Evaluate
progress and results at regular intervals.
- Revise
goals as needed.