Every relationship requires good communication. There are two major types of communication: verbal and non-verbal. For communication to be effective, the message must be delivered and received by the parties involved. In marriage, it has been discovered that poor communication is the bane of many troubled relationships between husband and wife. Many couples don’t know how to engage each other in good communication. Hence, there is always a bottleneck in their relationship, leading to a lot of rancor on the home front.
It is often said that “talk is cheap.” This is true considering that most people talk instead of communicate. After all, it’s free, and anything free is subject to abuse. That is why couples engage in verbal abuse. I am often amazed at the level of poor communication going on among couples. They talk to each other as if the etiquette of good communication does not matter when someone is your spouse in marriage.
The point I am making is that couples who engage in poor communication at home don’t often do that outside the marriage setting. They are polite in communicating with friends, colleagues at work, other people’s wives and husbands. Yet, you can see a woman who is so courteous outside, being rude at home to her husband with great impunity and vice versa.
Is it because we are married that we have to throw caution to the wind in communicating with our spouses? If the way we communicate in marriage was the way we communicated before marriage, then the marriage ceremony would never have taken place in the first instance. This is one of the reasons we have many troubled marriages. We have introduced what was never part of our relationship before marriage, so we now become strangers to each other, wondering how we ended up being husbands and wives.
Examples of poor marital communication
Here are some of the ways we create friction in the marriage through poor communication
Malice: This means when we have issues between husband and wife, we don’t talk about our grievances and hurts. Instead, we avoid talking to each other. When we act this way, we are destroying the marriage because we shut the door of reasoning together over our hurts in order to avoid such in the future. Even God gives us opportunity to air our views and hurts with Him. Malice is a bad way of proving your point or drawing your spouse’s attention to a wrong done against you.
Abusive language: Many couples are fond of engaging in the usage of abusive language at the slightest opportunity: “foolish woman”;” irresponsible man”; “idiot”; “fat pig”; “bone stick”; “big head”. The list seems endless. How on earth can you call your wife or husband all or any of these names, and expect good atmosphere to prevail in such marriage setting? No way! Of course, if you call your wife or husband an idiot or a fool, you yourself must be a bigger fool to have ended up with such an idiot or a fool. After all, “like begets like.” No wonder some children often mention such names in schools when asked to tell the teachers the names of their daddy or mummy. That is what they are used to in the house. Or better still, that is what daddy calls mummy at home.
Unguarded statements: Many of us engage in the use of unguarded statements in marriage. I often wonder why we do this to ourselves, instead of honouring each other. Is this one of the gifts one gets as a married person? Or why do we say what we say to ourselves with impunity. I do know that some of these things also happen outside the marriage setting, but it happens more frequently in marriage.
One day, a wife was talking outside the house to her husband who just drove into the compound. She asked for the children, and the husband disturbingly said he forgot that the children were still in school. The next statement the wife made before walking off was “what a wonderful father you are to forget your children in school”. Surprised just as I was?
Another man approached the wife for sex, and the response of the wife was “all that we get from you is to bash me down there without anything in return.” All this was because the man had lost his job and could no longer fulfill his financial obligations at home.
A man complaining about the taste of the food prepared by the wife simply said “this soup is like oil on water. It is flat.” While, another man said to his wife: “I never knew I married a struggle.”
While we may have genuine reasons to air our grievances, we will do ourselves great service to learn how to put it in the right way without being careless with our statements. The episode between Professor (Atthairu) Jega and Chief (Godsday) Orubebe during the 2015 election may be helpful in this wise.
Where does poor communication lead us to in marriage? Wife battering and husband witch-crafting as the case may be, discord, bad home training for children, among many other vices.
The truth of the matter is that the way many married couples communicate cannot make them live together happily hereafter. No wonder divorce and separation is on the increase these days. So, let us learn the rudiments of good communication and deplore them in keeping our marriages till death do us part, without being instrumental in such deaths of our spouses.
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