marital communication

Partly but not entirely because two of the groomsmen from my wedding are getting married or have gotten married this year, I have been thinking about marital relationships a lot lately. It amazes me how fundamentally different men and women are, and how God not only allows, but also ordains, that the most important relationship that the majority of people have is with someone so incredibly different from them.

I see it in other marriages and even in my own where the couple can have a conversation and each person in the couple can walk away with a completely different understanding of what was just discussed. Words like romance, happiness, contentment, love, hurt, respect, security, power, worth, trust, and thousands of other words are all loaded and have different meanings to different people. When people talk about communication being one of the most important things about marriage they seem to downplay that the real complication is getting both spouses to the point where they agree what the meaning of the word, "is," is. I have seen plenty of relationships where at least one spouse was completely unaware that the other spouse essentially spoke another language, so merely encouraging communication may not always suffice.

So, if there is something that I wish I had known better when I got married it is that I needed to pay more attention for what Golden and I each meant when we were discussing something important. A lot of things that seem benign to one spouse are deeply tied to some inner need of the other, so what inner needs were being discussed that only one person at the table even understood was the basis of the conversation? Of course, this only illustrates how much I still have to learn.

I have one question for the married people out there. What is something you wish you realized before you got married that you know better now? Obviously, make it something that wouldn't embarrass you or your spouse.