Rule 5.  Listen to what I mean, not what I said! 

When we communicate we try to take a complex picture that we have in our heads and capture it in a few words. If a picture is worth a thousand words and we try to describe it in 10 or 15 clearly we are leaving out a lot of information. We expect our spouse to fill in the blanks - but what's the chance that he or she will put back the exact same 990 words that we took out? It's easy to see that miss-communication is probably the rule rather than the exception. To make relationships work it's vital that we communicate accurately. We have to take the responsibility for making sure we are understood. That means saying the same thing in perhaps a number of different ways until we're sure our spouse understands the idea the same way that we do. You may be surprised, if you ask your spouse to repeat back what you just said, at how different their version is than what you thought you said. It's important to do a lot of perception checking rather than reacting to what you think the other is trying to say.  We also have to pay attention to non-verbal communication. Experts agree that up to 97% of the information in a message is  non verbal ( body language, voice tone). If body language and the spoken words convey different messages it's the non-verbal that is usually believed.

Rule 6. If you want to know what's going on - ASK.

Too often we try to mind read or intuit what someone is thinking or feeling. This almost always leads us into mistaken assumptions - unless you've got a working crystal ball.. For many years, if I wanted to know what my wife was really feeling, I would try to imagine what I would be feeling if I was behaving the way she was. Since we were very different       people this didn't work at all.  How I reacted, however, was based on these false assumptions about what was going on inside her mind. This just added to the confusion since my wife couldn't understand why I was reacting the way I was so SHE started trying to figure it out by thinking what she would be feeling if she acted the way I was acting. Within a few weeks we were at a complete standstill with neither of us having a clue about what was really going on. I finally learnt that mind reading didn't work and I needed to ask directly if I wanted to know what my wife was feeling.  These problems often show up in the form of "  If you really loved me you'd...." . For example, one way my wife expresses her love is to keep the house clean and tidy. When I come home and there's the smell of furniture polish  I get irritated at once. I know that the papers and books I left on the coffee table will have been stacked away somewhere and it'll take me a week to find them.  My wife's intention was to let me know she cares but I'm angry and frustrated because I'm going to have to go hunting for my stuff. As you can imagine there were lots of harsh words before we got this one sorted out. I had to learn that a clean house means " I love you" and react to the meaning that's intended, not the one I received. It works the other way too. When I want to buy presents for my wife I spend a lot of time figuring out what unusual gift she'd like but wouldn't be expecting. My intention is to show her how much I'm thinking of her and how much time and trouble I went to in getting just the right gift. I never got quite the response I was hoping for and one year I didn't have time to be creative on Valentine's day. I ended up just getting her a dozen long stemmed roses and I was a bit ashamed of how predictable a gift that was. When I handed them over, however, the response was amazing. She'd never received a dozen roses before and after she stopped crying I got the kiss of a lifetime. I did learn from this experience. The next week I brought home a  hundred roses. It had exactly the effect I hoped it would, and I stopped trying to be so creative in my gift giving after that.

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