YMJ017: Are you cultivating regular communication in your marriage?

Resources from this episode

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What you’ll hear on this episode…

• 0:00:46 Communication Check: How Are You Doing as a Couple?
• 0:01:17 Importance of Communication in Christian Marriage
• 0:02:04 Effective Communication: Listening to understand
• 0:10:25 The Power of Communication in Daily Life
• 0:11:11 Seeking Unity and Discovering Spouse’s Heart

This episode emphasizes the importance of communication in marriage. Open discussions, addressing expectations, and regular communication foster love and understanding. 

TRANSCRIPT TO FOLLOW (not edited)

How are you doing with your communication as a couple? You’ve talked about communication a lot, and as you’ve listened to episodes, you’ve hopefully heard things that are helpful.
And I know within your own head, you’re processing it, but have you communicated about it?
Are you talking about it as a couple?
And how is your communication in general going?
So this is like a heart check of your relationship because the heart of your relationship is communication.

Importance of Communication in Christian Marriage

[1:17] It’s the foundation of how you grow close to one another is through your communication.
So how are y’all doing? Are y’all communicating? It’s important to ask this question periodically because if your communication is faltering or perhaps it’s just fallen off the radar, problems are going to ensue.
Whether it’s just practical problems like someone forgot to pick up the kids from school.

[1:43] All the way to assumptions being made about each other’s motives and actions and this and that and offense being taken when really no offense was really intended.
Lack of communication is very problematic.
It can be the poison that can destroy your relationship. And when we communicate as husband and wife, our goal is to understand each other.

Effective Communication: Understanding and Listening

[2:04] It’s to come to a place of knowing what the other person thinks about the subject or the situation and how they feel about it.
It reminds me of Proverbs 20, verse number five.
It says, the purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water. So get that picture, okay?
The purpose, the motives, the intention in a person’s heart is like deep water.
I picture this big river that’s just flowing slowly because it’s so deep and it’s just moving along.
And it says, but a man of understanding will draw it out. So he’s drawing that purpose out of the deep water.
So communication is what enables that to happen. and how can you be a man or a wife of understanding?

[2:47] A very effective way to be a man or woman of understanding is by listening. Listening to what your spouse is saying. And then when they share something with you, you ask more questions to help understand it from a different angle or to understand more about it. So we as husband and wife, we need to be good listeners. Yeah. James chapter one says, says, know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
So that quick to hear part, he doesn’t just mean hearing the sounds, he’s meaning listening.
Be quick to hear what the other person is saying and really understanding.
And I think what Mindy said about learning to ask questions is vital in making sure we’re hearing what is really true.

[3:38] Someone makes a comment or reveals something that they’re feeling or thinking, it’s very seldom the case that we immediately understand every nuance of what they mean. We need to ask questions, we need to learn how to explore, not in an interrogating kind of a way, but in a curious way, in a caring and compassionate way, really seeking to understand.
For example, as a wife, you really want to love your husband well, but how are you going to know how to love them well if you don’t know what their needs are necessarily emotionally and mentally, physically, spiritually? So that comes through communication, asking questions, finding out how you might have offended them or finding out that they had an expectation and you didn’t fulfill it because you didn’t know. So this is all through communication. This is all through speaking words to one another. And then listening to those words and asking questions about those words.

[4:42] And granted, there are people and personalities, depending on how they were raised many times, who are very uncomfortable communicating. You may, out of a good place, good motive, ask a question, how are you doing? Did this make you feel insecure? And they just get really uncomfortable because communication in general is uncomfortable. I guess we can say for the person who’s asking the question, be patient, be loving, try real hard to be humble about that and not get offended. And for the person on the other side, you got to learn to open up. You got to learn to share what’s going on inside of you so that your relationship can become all it’s intended to be.
Yes, and communication is also very much needed just practically day to day, just knowing one another’s schedules, when you’ll be home from work, who’s gonna pick up the kids, what appointments you might have, if someone invited you over for dinner, practical things.
So communication helps on the surface level, it helps on the heart level, the emotional level, physical level.
We really cannot be a healthy married couple if we don’t have good communication.
Yeah, and I think at the heart of that is God’s description of a man and woman becoming one.

[5:59] We’ll think that through. Two become one. We even say that in a marriage ceremony many times as this prosaic kind of good feeling thing to say at a wedding.
But think of the reality of that.
If two are becoming one, that can’t happen if communication isn’t happening.
You’re gonna stay separated from each other because you don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s heart or head. and you really need to.
And so a Christian marriage, we should be striving for that kind of oneness, that kind of unity that communication brings.

[6:31] And might I say as a man who didn’t know how to communicate when I first got married, this is a long, hard road.
You have to be willing to dedicate yourself to it and to grow and learn and become a curious person rather than a critical person or become a person who’s willing to ask questions when you’re confused by something.
I mean, I just said two words that begin with C because they’re helpful to me, curiosity and confusion.
If either of those happened in a conversation I’m having with Mindy, I want to ask a question.
Because there’s something I’m not getting or something that intrigues me and I want to know more. Yeah. And another thing that naturally happens is that we have expectations of our spouse.

[7:11] And many times we don’t tell them our expectations. There’s been times when I might go out to coffee with a friend and they’re complaining to me about something that their husband has done or keeps on doing. And I’ll just ask, well, have you talked to them about that? Do they know you don’t like that?
And they will say, well, no, I mean, he should know. And I always get so frustrated because I’m thinking, poor husband. I mean, just help one another to know how to love you. I mean, like, if you’re the wife, help your husband to know how to love you well by kindly communicating your expectations and vice versa with the husband. The husband needs to communicate with the wife what they expect. And we’re not going to always know what our expectations are. And many times, I have realized that I’ve had an expectation because I’m all of a sudden feeling irritated or angry.

[8:04] Because my husband didn’t do something that I thought they should do.
And then I realized, oh, I didn’t even talk to him about it.
So I don’t have a right to be irritated. I don’t have a right to be angry because there’s not been communication about it.
So those are some things for us as husband and wife to watch out for.
And so back to our original question, how are you doing with your communication?
Do you need a refresher? Do you need a reminder? That’s hopefully what this episode is, is a little nudge in the right direction, get back to communicating.
We’ve often counseled couples when we’re walking through the disagreements and difficulties they face, to establish a pattern of daily communication.
30 minutes on the couch when you get home, 30 minutes over lunch, just whatever is possible in your life, where you can unpack the day’s events, where you can talk about emotions and who’s dealing with what, and at least have some communication.
The couples we see that continue to struggle and continue to have situations where they get crossways with each other are the couples who don’t communicate regularly.
And if we can say that again, the couples who are having a hard time are those couples who are not communicating regularly.
It is a simple fix to a huge problem. So we encourage you and we plead with you, dear friends out there, to get into a good habit of communication with your spouse.
Amen. And let me say something to the husbands real quickly.

[9:32] You may be the one who didn’t grow up communicating, it doesn’t come naturally for you, and it may be a bother to you.
I mean, you may just feel like, we talked about this last week, do we have to talk about this again?
Yes, you do. If your wife is still concerned about it, if there’s some sort of a confusion or a lack of unity in an area, yes, you need to talk about it again.
Be patient with the process. Unity does not happen overnight.
It takes time for trust to build. It takes time for understanding of each other to happen.
Just be patient with the process and dive in again with that heart full of love for your spouse and believe the Lord’s gonna help you to understand each other and to communicate well.
Yes, and that is so good. And then on the practical side, schedules of life are always changing.
So that’s another reason why we need to have communication all the time.

The Power of Communication in Daily Life

[10:25] So communication helps us deal with the heart level, but it also helps us deal with the day-to-day schedule level if you wanna say it that way.
So the practical and the passion, maybe, is a way to say it.
The purposes of the heart or something like that. Anyway, make up your own acronym.
Well, let’s wrap up with a prayer.
Lord Jesus, thank you for the gift of communication. And I thank you, Father, that you are our model of communication.
You speak to us through your word.
You speak to us through your prophets and through your Holy Spirit and through other, believers through things like music and nature and just all kinds of ways you speak.
And that’s a model for us that we should be speaking and we should be listening.

Seeking Unity and Discovering Spouse’s Heart

[11:11] We should be paying attention and discovering what’s going on inside of our spouse’s heart, so that we can be unified.