Better communication seems to occur in less stressful marriages. But are you sure which one causes which? Those couples who communicate better experience less stress (as measured by cortisol in their saliva) while discussing a difficult topic. But when you give randomly selected couples a squirt of oxytocin nasal spray in a relationship lab, they communicate better than the couples who...
Lots of folks seem convinced the biggest cause of unhappy marriages is poor communication. They may be right, except that they try to solve the problem by saying more or demanding their mate answer their accusations. Say you start off with the wrong assumption. For example, you mistake grumpiness for criticism because, like so many of us, you’re expecting someone who promised to love you...
Pay attention to Steven Stosny’s wonderful advice about using at home the communication techniques you learned in the therapist’s office or in a book. In Marriage Problems: How Communication Techniques Can Make Them Worse, Stosny writes: Early in your relationship you chose to feel connected, just as, if you’re thinking about communication techniques now, you’re choosing...
Pace and Kyeli Smith have knocked one out of the park with their new couples communication book, The Usual Error: Why We Don’t Understand Each Other and 34 Ways to Make It Better. What is the Usual Error? It is the very normal, very human, big-trouble-creating mistake we all make. It is assuming that others think like us, would react like us, or value the same things we do. When we do this...
I am a widow who got it right the second time. I have been sharing here since February 14, 2006 what I learned from that experience and from positive psychology, marriage research, and my training as a marriage educator.
