Five Communication Responses that Happy Couples Share

Categories: Marriage Tips

By Denny Freeman on February 5, 2018

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Dear Brides:

In our last letter, we talked about taking time to have a realistic look at your relationship. The question is: How healthy is your relationship?

When I counsel pre-marital couples, I use a Q and A assessment from the company, Prepare and Enrich. Then I also review the results of the companys national survey of over 50,000 couples.

In their survey, 20,678 couples were happily married while 20,590 couples were unhappily married. The remaining 8, 732 couples were mixed because one partner was happy and one partner was not.

The reason Im sharing this information with you is, so you can learn from the experience of others.

The survey could predict whether the couple was happy or unhappy just by analyzing their scores in these five areas.

The first area was communication–no surprise here. The study espouses communication as a major gauge of marital happiness.

The five issues regarding communication.

I am very satisfied with how we talk to each other.
My partner understands how I feel.
I find it easy to express my true feelings to my partner.
My partner is a very good listener.
My partner does not make comments that put me down.

Its essential to remember that communication often has less to do with the words we use and more to do with the underlying meaning. Communication by words, experts say, is 7% of the message. Body language is 38% and tone is 55% of the message being communicated.

You cannot “not” communicate!

Even when we say nothing, we are communicating to the other person.

Communication is the key to intimacy. Communication is vital because its the link to every aspect of our relationship. The outcome of discussions and decisions about finances, children, careers, religion, and expressing our feelings and desires will depend on the communication process.

Communication has the power to bring couples together and the means to push couples apart. It has the power to convey anger or forgiveness, happiness or sadness, love or concern. The willingness and ability to communicate contribute greatly to the health and happiness of a relationship. The good news? Communication is a learned skill that can be taught and practiced.

In our next letter, I will share the five issues the survey study raised from over 50,000 couples that were problematic for married couples.

Until next time,

FarmerD

P.S. In our last marriage seminar Sandy and I attended in November, the key word we both came away from the weekend was “understanding”. Understanding each other better. Communication is the key if you
e going to grow in understanding each other better.