Sure love and sex and all those other things we’ve talked about are important but there’s one thing that is vital. Communication- I know it’s something I talk about often in connection with marriage. Communication is vital before marriage and once we are married. It’s really the glue hat keeps a marriage together. If you can’t talk, and really talk, to your marriage partner about anything and everything then it makes for a difficult situation.
We all want someone who accepts us as we are and who understands us. That someone should be the person we’re married to. We should know them almost as well as we know ourselves, maybe even better. Sometimes we have blind spots when it comes to ourselves and our own faults and shortcomings.
When we’re trying to get to know someone we’ve just met, we ask questions about their lives. One of the questions I usually ask is ‘what things usually occupy your week?’ That helps you know a little more about their interests and often opens up the conversation so that you can find some point of connection. If they only talk about work, that tells you something about where their priorities lie.
So a question you might ask your spouse is, ‘How was your day?’ But make sure you are ready to listen to their answer and respond to it.
The main thing is not to just ask the way some people do, ‘how are you?’ and before you can even answer they’ve moved on not expecting an answer. It was just like a rhetorical question. You get the feeling they had no interest in the answer. So if you spouse shares something of their day show an interest in what they are telling you. Ask questions about it. If they tell you the day was good or stressful or whatever, then you can ask what happened to make it that way.
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