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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

We Can’t Even Talk To Each Other

Ladies' Home Journal

“After 30 years, my parents still have the happiest marriage,” says Toni, 29, who’s been married to Jack for six years. “They rarely fight, and when they have a disagreement, they discuss it - respectfully, compromising until things work out,” she adds. “I’ve tried that with Jack - but how can you talk to a man who just won’t answer you?”

Her husband, she says, has ways of refusing to pay attention. “Sometimes, he actually leaves the room when I’m in the middle of a sentence.”

Jack thinks if he ignores problems, they’ll just go away - and they have lots of problems, Toni insists, explaining that when first married, they agreed to be equal partners in their construction business. But most of the time, Toni is stuck home with their two daughters, ages 2 and 4, running errands, doing laundry, going grocery shopping and handling the bookkeeping and other office work for their company, all of which she hates.

“I am perfectly willing to listen to Toni,” says Jack, 30, “if she’d let me get a word in edgewise. She doesn’t talk to me - she talks at me. And she often gets so upset and angry, I want to hide in the basement.”

Jack agrees his in-laws have a great marriage - but that’s because they both take the time to listen, he notes. “I’ve been talking to them about my problems since I was a teenager,” Jack reminisces. “My Dad died when I was 10 and I could never talk to my mother - she’s a bitter, cold woman who still doesn’t think I’ve amounted to anything, even though I own a successful business. She thinks you’re not good enough unless you’re a lawyer or a doctor. But Toni’s folks were always there for me. They treated me like a son.”

Now that he thinks about it, when Toni bounces from one lament to another, she bears a striking resemblance to his mother. Jack says he wants his wife back at work as much as she wants to be. But he thinks it’s time for a reality check.

“You can’t have everything all the time. We decided to have a family, and that means sacrificing. We need Toni to take care of the kids, so we can save money on child care, and we need her to do the bookkeeping so we can save on office help.” That way, he says, we can pour as much money back into the business as possible until the girls are older and Toni can come back to work full time.

When you feel like you’re talking to a wall

“Jack and Toni idealized her parents’ marriage and thought such communication should come effortlessly,” notes Frana K. Dupree, a New Haven, Conn., marriage counselor. They didn’t understand that that takes years of negotiating, patient adjustment and self-discipline, Dupree says.

Clearly, these two loved each other, wanted to stay together but lacked the necessary basic communication techniques. They were each falling into what many experts have identified as typical gender-related patterns of communicating. For example, men often see every complaint as an attack, then blame their wife for upsetting them; fail to pay attention when a spouse becomes emotional; jump in with a quick-fix solution instead of listening. Women tend to speak in angry accusatory tones that put a spouse on the defensive; complain repetitively about what he hasn’t done without expressing appreciation for what he does do; offer unsolicited advice to improve a husband’s behavior, instead of expressing a problem in the larger context of how much they love their mate and want things to be better.

Do any of these characteristics sound familiar? The following exercise can help fix stereotypical communication styles.

First, make a list of topics you frequently argue about. When the children are in bed and you’re both not too tired, set a kitchen timer for 20 minutes and turn on a tape recorder. Take turns discussing your views on that one issue only. Listen carefully and don’t interrupt each other. In this way, you’ll be able to detect certain patterns.

For instance, Jack was able to hear how negative he really was in both tune and comment when he complained about Toni’s housekeeping, lack of interest in managing the office and mistakes she made balancing the books. Listening to the tape at home, Toni heard how often she interrupted her husband and leapfrogged from one topic to another without giving him a chance to answer her first question. Becoming aware of these patterns helped them to better express themselves.