Unlocking Your Ears

July/August 2009 Issue | Posted by Paul Donoghue and Mary Siegel in Features

Couples who enjoy the safety of trust and who listen attentively to one another know the growth-prompting promise of intimacy. Why then, is this kind of love so difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain?

Statistics bear sad witness to the failure of marriages to achieve happiness. Tragically, even couples who stay together often live lives of angry or quiet desperation. Why is real listening so often replaced in the home by bickering, tension, and distance?

The answer, other than our inclination to selfishness, lies in the depth of the need that we have to be known, loved, and appreciated by the ones we love most. There are many blocks that get in the way of spouses really listening to one another. Here are a few of the major ones:

Listening Block 1:

Intense Emotion

Strong feelings can block our efforts to listen. An acquaintance telling us that she is losing her job might engender our feelings of concern or care and allow us to be sincerely empathic. A spouse reporting the same devastating news can set off such intense emotions in us that listening becomes nearly impossible.

Our needs regarding the security of our financial status can provoke such anxiety that we stop listening. We might even suspect that our spouse may have caused the job termination or triggered the problem. Listening becomes the victim of intense emotion.

Powerful emotion is linked to profound need. Nowhere are our needs more pronounced than in our central relationship. Our spouse’s affirmation, or lack of it, can confirm or deny our intelligence, attractiveness, and worth.

For example, a wife might say she is dissatisfied with the size of her house or apartment. In his vulnerability, however, what the husband might hear is, “You are a poor provider.”

Alternately, when a husband mentions that he would like to go on a fishing trip with a few friends, an insecure wife might hear, “I’d have more fun with my friends than with you.”

Our needs — and feelings — are strongest with our spouse. Sadly, those very feelings can impair our ability to listen.

Counteraction: Perspective

When you feel yourself beginning to react strongly or emotionally to something your spouse says to you, take a break. Excuse yourself from the conversation until you can put it into perspective. Put yourself in your spouse’s position and try to see his point of view without coloring it with your own.

It’s when we remove our own emotions from a conversation that we become open to hearing what our spouse really has to say. The message is often less complicated than we make it. Sometimes a wife just longs for a larger living space or a husband just wants to go on a fishing trip. No condemnation is implied.

Listening Block 2:

Individual Differences

Differences between spouses further block their abilities to listen with patience. Opposites might attract, but they can also frustrate. Differences can be stimulating, but they can also be annoying and confusing.

Take the case of Wendy and Ron, for example. Ron is very neat in his appearance and in the way that he maintains his office and belongings. He complains to Wendy frequently, “When you don’t put your stuff away the place looks bad. Why don’t you put dirty dishes into the dishwasher? Your clothes are all over the bedroom. It drives me crazy.”

Wendy reacts, “Lighten up! This is our house — not a museum! You put me on edge all the time.”

Wendy is not hearing Ron’s need for order, his discomfort with untidiness, or his hurt at her not responding to his needs. Ron is not hearing that Wendy feels angry and hurt at his criticism and her resentment that his way of doing things is being imposed on her. Instead they blame each other and in so many words imply, “You should be like me.”

In their lives together, couples are forced to negotiate differences in many areas. These differences might include tastes in music, literature, food, home decoration, and sleep habits. They also encompass personality characteristics such as introvert vs. extrovert, adventurous vs. cautious, and laissez faire vs. controlling.

Counteraction: It’s Not About You

Emotional distance and acrimony are frequent results of interpreting the other’s behavior as about me, insensitivity towards me, and lack of care for me. 

In order for real understanding to occur, we must hear what our spouse’s behavior says about himself or herself, not what we believe it to say about us.

Instead, though, differences sometimes provoke frustration and hurt. It is easy to interpret our spouse’s difference as insensitive and indifferent to us. A husband can read his wife’s insistence on staying up after he goes to bed as a sign that she doesn’t want to be close to him at the end of the day. She can see his desire for nightly companionship with her as a failure to understand her need to complete chores or unwind at the end of the day.

The wife must listen to her husband’s need to cuddle and to be close before going to sleep. He has to hear and to understand her desire for precious private time before retiring. When they have truly understood each other’s needs, they are free to act in ways that are mutually fulfilling.

Maybe they will cuddle for a while before he sleeps and she gets up to enjoy private time. Or, maybe they will alternate nights when they retire together or separately. The solutions may vary, but listening without the taint of defensiveness can bring unique benefits to both partners.

We chose our spouses because we are alike in core ways and because we are attracted and intrigued by the differences. We need to keep appreciating and enjoying these important differences. Our spouse’s uniqueness is a treasure to be discovered and explored with loving attention.

Listening Block 3:

Temptation to Change

Your Spouse

When we fear that our needs will not be met, our reactions war against understanding the person whom we need to respond to us. We don’t want to understand; we want to be satisfied. We are inclined to change our spouse to make sure our needs are met.

This is a difficult temptation to combat. You might think, “How easy things would be if only my spouse would change.” You know your needs and you know when your partner is not meeting them.

For example, suppose because of a childhood experience with an alcoholic parent, a wife concludes, “I need to relax at a party, and in order for that to happen, I need my husband not to drink. So I’ll make it clear to him that he should have only one beer. If he sticks to that, I’ll be happy at the party.” 

But it’s not that simple. She is seeing things through the lens of her own needs. But he has needs also, one of which might be not to be told what to do. Another might be to relax socially, and more than one beer might help him to meet that need.

The wife might presume, “If he loves me, he will want to do that for me.” Her husband, however, hears not her fear of drunkenness, but a command, “Don’t drink.” He also might hear, “My needs matter, yours don’t.” Or “You are bad if you don’t do as I ask.” Hearing blame, judgment, control, or lack of respect and trust, his tendency might be to resent and rebel.

Counteraction: Share Feelings, Not Demands

If we want to be heard, we need to share ourselves, our feelings, and our needs. We have to resist making judgments and issuing threats and commands. If the wife in the previous example shared her fears and anxiety with her husband, then he would be invited to understand her. He could enter her world of tension in social settings where alcohol is involved.

If he hears her dread of repeating her childhood, he would be invited to understand her, not thwart her. If he shared with her his tendency to rebel, his need for her trust, and his own need to relax, then the possibility for understanding is opened. In really understanding him, she may grow more secure and relaxed about his behavior.

Pure Attention, Pure Love

There are many other blocks to ef­ ­ fective listening between spouses, from lack of time to lack of privacy, from poor communication habits learned in childhood to bad patterns of interacting developed over their years of marriage. All couples must learn to identify the particular attitudes and behaviors that keep them from listening to one another.

You vowed at your wedding to love the person that God has given you. Love is “pure attention to the other.” In love, we attend closely to the be­ loved.

We understand her needs and rhythms. We listen carefully to his ups and downs, ins and outs. In love, we are known more generously than we know ourselves.

The essential belief of the Christian is that we are redeemed, totally known, and loved by God. No one can communicate that truth of God’s love to us as adults more profoundly or more consistently than our spouse.

The daily offering of that gift is not provided by nice-sounding words or extravagant gifts. It is given through careful, attentive, generous listening.E

This article was adapted by the authors Paul J. Donoghue, Ph.D., and Mary E. Siegel, Ph.D., from their book Are You Really Listening: Keys to Successful Communication

(Sorin Books 2005).

Nowhere are our needs more pronounced than in our central relationship. Our spouse’s affirmation, or lack of it, can confirm or deny our intelligence, our attractiveness, and our worth.

When we fear that our needs will not be met, our reactions war against understanding the person whom we need to respond to us. We don’t want to understand; we want to be satisfied.