Communication has become so identified with marriage and its problems that many couples come into my office and say, “We have a communication problem,” instead of just saying, “We have a marital problem.” They have learned this from marital therapists.
It so happens that the pioneers of modern marital therapy were communication oriented. They thought that all sorts of psychological problems, even schizophrenia, could be caused by pathological communication.
Contemporary marital therapists don’t think that bad communication can cause anything quite as devastating as schizophrenia but they do think that bad communication is at the root of many marital problems—and so they focus on helping couples alter their patterns of communication. Couples are trained to express their feelings more directly, to listen more sensitively and to negotiate more effectively.
It’s a great advantage, in marriage, to have good communication skills. But when marriages are in trouble it’s generally not because couples are deficient in these skills. Most people with marriage problems are perfectly good communicators. And research shows that partners who have problems communicating with each other have no trouble at all communicating with anybody else. And I have done couple therapy with unhappily married lawyers, sales and marketing people, and public relations professionals—people with super-duper communication skills. Not being able to communicate was not the problem with these couples.
When couples in unhappy marriages do have communication problems, it’s not because the communication problems caused the marital but the other way around: The marriage problems caused the communication problems. It’s easy enough to see why. The emotional tension of being in an unhappy marriage—the disappointment, the resentment, the rage—makes it hard to sit there quietly, listen attentively, and respond reasonably.
The fundamental problem for many couples is not communication but rather understanding. The partners fail to understand each other despite their ability to communicate. They understand what their partner is saying, but they don’t understand how their partner could say that—how their partner could think and feel as they say they do.
You may be familiar with that kind of communication failure in mutual understanding from your own relationships, whether romantic or non-romantic. For example you’re debating abortion with somebody who wants to ban it. You each understand what the other is saying—and the more clearly you communicate, the greater the gulf between you becomes. You both walk away from that encounter unable to understand how the other could think and feel the way they do.
The articulate, unhappily married people who complain of communication problems don’t understand each other as people because they are so different from each other in many important ways that even their highly skillful communication can’t bridge the gulf in their mutual understanding.
And that’s the problem with the idea that communication is the key to happy marriage: It doesn’t take into account that, for empathic understanding between people, communication isn’t enough. For people to be happy in their marriage they must be able to understand not just what their partner is saying, but the experience behind the words. When people are very different from each other—when they are not compatible—they cannot do that. They cannot understand what it’s like to be their partner—to understand their partner empathically—and the best communication in the world won’t help. (And so it’s not surprising that the long-term outcome results for communication-oriented approaches to couple therapy are in the disappointing 30% range.)
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Food for thought: You’re the only one who can be honest with yourself.
Copyright © 2024 by Samuel R. Hamburg