I watched this play out at a Toastmasters meeting that Anna wanted to attend. After your first meeting or two, Toastmasters invites you to give a five-minute talk. I prepared mine carefully, making sure that every word was perfect. And, that’s how I delivered it, with consummate precision. The audience politely clapped but without enthusiasm. Then, Anna gave her talk. She spoke from the heart, without worrying about word choice, or the finer points of elocution, and she connected. They rewarded her with loud applause. A humbling experience to be sure, considering that I’d made a significant part of my living speaking.
The most important audience you’ll ever have is your spouse. It is he or she, above all, with whom you have to connect if you want to enjoy a happy and fulfilling marriage.
Hindering the Connection
I’ve stressed how we’re sinners; we marry sinners and so do our spouses. This is merely to accept a fundamental tenet of Christian doctrine: we fail to love God or our neighbor as ourself. As the late theologian Paul Jewett put it,11 rather than loving our neighbor as ourself, we love ourself in our neighbor.
Utopian hopes to the contrary, there will be no perfection of humanity in this life, and therefore Christians continue to live in the tension between two natures, which the New Testament refers to as flesh and spirit. Flesh, as used in Scripture, is how English Bibles often translate the Greek word sarx, which refers to more than sensuality.12 It encompasses narcissism and egocentricity.
If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,13 coming to terms with our imperfections is a corollary of such fear. Fear is a biblical way of expressing how without reckoning with and acknowledging the ultimate worthiness of God,14 human beings remain in the dark. Regardless of how otherwise brilliant, they fail to grasp the most important realities that determine the nature and significance of human existence. Another way of putting this might be that genuine faith begins with recognizing and coming to terms with the implications of the radical difference between God’s nature and ours. This is sound theology.
What is unsound is trying to excuse and explain away bad behavior by insisting how, after all, we’re “just sinners.” In past conflicts with Anna, when she’s expressed her objection to something I’ve said or done that conveyed rigidity, ingratitude, or ungraciousness—perhaps all three—that’s precisely how I’ve sometimes responded.
This, of course, has left her neither pleased nor amused. Anna’s reaction has often been that I was being flippant and not taking her feelings seriously. She was right of course. Asserting that I’m a sinner, blithely dismissing and failing to acknowledge the specifics of what I’d done, not only failed to increase our connectedness but, on the contrary, decreased it.
Sure, you’re a sinner, you make mistakes, and so on. But don’t use this reality as a ready-to-hand excuse, a way to fall back on an abstract generality to dismiss, diminish, or rationalize away a legitimate complaint about the concrete specifics of your words or actions. Such excuses never enhance communication.
Communication as Food for the Soul and the Marriage
People need other people, relationships, and if they’re deprived of human contact for long—for example, through forced isolation—they suffer and, in some instances, markedly deteriorate. Communication is the food on which relationships exist. It is the medium in which they grow. Humans have been expressly created for psychospiritual communion with other human begins, for what, in a church context, is often called fellowship. When people communicate, which they do in countless ways, it’s as if they’re performing a kind of mind-meld. In a limited way, they’re temporarily allowing at least one other person to read their minds.
We cannot truly know another person’s mind without permission. Perhaps we can make good guesses, inferences based on what we observe, and a few gifted psychoanalysts15 have demonstrated a remarkable ability to do this. But, regardless of how skilled we are at this, we remain in the position of having to guess.
If Sally moves slowly, looks down, and tears up, we may assume that she’s sad or depressed. But even here, we may get it wrong. Sally may simply be repositioning an irritating contact lens. To know with certainty what another person is thinking or feeling, he or she usually has to tell us, which presupposes candor. Once such self-disclosure occurs, the person will have contributed sustenance to the relationship. And, in response, we’re likely to contribute some relational nourishment of our own.
Some people suffer from what I have described elsewhere as emotional aphasia.16 Aphasia is the medical term for a number of language disorders. A requirement for the diagnosis of expressive aphasia is that the person was previously able to use language, for example to say words, but now has trouble doing so. I use the term metaphorically, so it is not so much that the person has lost the ability to express emotion, but that he or she may never have developed it in the first place. Such people have rarely been able to put their thoughts and feelings into words, have little ability to enrich any relationship beyond mere subsistence, and feel comfortable only with those who are similarly bereft of expressive capacity.
Men are more likely than women to suffer from emotional aphasia. Sometimes, however, women also demonstrate it. Whether male or female, such people may be otherwise bright, even gifted, but they cannot, or in some instances out of fear will not, put into words what’s going on inside their minds. And so, they provide few nutrients to sustain a relationship. Their marriages tend to suffer and die of communicative malnutrition.
Importance of Clear Communication: Digital versus Analog Messages
Until the invention of digital media such as MP3 files, all recordings were analog. This meant that they routinely contained a certain amount of distortion, which was often unavoidable. With the advent of the digital age, it became possible to produce near flawless recordings. The goal in a marriage is to communicate precisely, which implies more directly and with less interference from extraneous noise. Communicating clearly is an art that is acquired neither quickly nor easily.
If you think of what it takes to learn how to cook well, or consistently return a ball in table tennis, you can understand how mastering the art of clear communication requires practice. Learning to say exactly what you mean can take years, which is what is usually required to develop strong expressive skills. Doing so also takes courage.
There lies within most, if not all, of us the desire to make ourselves look good and avoid criticism, and so we tend to slant what we say to create the most favorable impression. Putting this starkly, we all have at least a slight tendency to lie, to shade the truth, especially to our spouses. This is because we have so much at stake. Later in this chapter, I will return to the subject of lying to one’s spouse, and emphasize why this is not a good idea. Here, I’d simply like to encourage you to make it a personal goal to communicate within your marriage as courageously, candidly, and caringly as you can.
If you find it hard to put into words what’s in your mind—if it’s difficult to think out loud—make it your objective to acquire this ability. Further developing your expressive skills may be among the most potent tonics you can give to your marriage. It’s also one of the best insurance policies against either of you drifting off into another relationship.
Keep at it. Expand your expressive vocabulary. This will take time, but with persistence you’ll gradually increase your emotional fluency. An easy way to start would be simply to say out loud, when you’re alone, what you’re thinking and feeling. Try it! You might be amazed at how quickly you’ll learn to put into words what’s going on in your head.
Communication as a Marital Foundation
Another