Effective Marital Communications

After twenty-three years of marriage, my wife and I have lost the ability to finish our own sentences. Unfortunately, we’ve never gained the power of reliably finishing each other’s sentences. A typical conversation over the dinner table has more gaps than a six-year-old’s smile.

My wife starts strong with something like, “Did you remember to stop and pick-up the … ummm ….” She winds down and her face goes blank until she looks like Paris Hilton on Final Jeopardy. It’s clear that her brain has vapor-locked, so I do my best to step-in and help out.

“You mean the … “ My mouth sends an urgent request to my brain for the rest of the sentence. My ever-helpful brain can’t find the information, but does return the mental equivalent of a 404 web error. Page not found. Try using a different address or contact the webmaster.

My wife recovers nicely from my verbal fumble and says, “No. You know … the thing with that one thing?”

“You mean the thing?” I ask.

“No,” she says vehemently. “The other thing.”

“Oh!” Comprehension finally dawns on me the way mushroom clouds used to dawn on nuclear test sites. “You mean the THING!”

“Yeah,” my wife confirms. “The thing. Did you remember it?”

“No. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

To an outside observer this is a completely dysfunctional approach to communication. Can you imagine what it would be like if some high-powered government types — say FBI agents — started communicating like that?

“Bob, did you set-up the surveillance equipment on … oh … you know, that one guy?”

“What? You mean the guy with the suit?”

“Which suit?”

“You know, the good suit.”

“No. Not him. The other guy. The one with the pinstripes.”

Assuming they ever got any actual information, they’ve have no real way of knowing if they were monitoring the right guy. Yet my wife and I seem to make this kind of round-about communication work.

I blame her.

Before I married her, I lived in happy ignorance of non-linear dialogue. Most of my friends were male and, for us, conversation was a lot like a bobsled run; you started at the top and followed the track all the way down. It wasn’t until after I was married that I realized my wife’s conversations were more like interstate interchanges where topics branch and circle and twist and one wrong turn could take you right out of town.

Really.

We might start out discussing some weighty topic like the politics, religion, or both as embodied in the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. We’ll bat about a few ideas and then, without so much as a turn signal my wife will say, “My mom really likes it.”

“Your mother watches Galactica?”

“No. The writing desk. The one I gave her for her birthday.”

Up to that point, I’d been following the conversation pretty well. The sudden shift in topic caught me off guard and I Wile E. Coyote’d into the side of a conceptual mesa. With my face flattened and my brain bent, my only option was to ask my wife to turn around and come back for me.

“How’d we get from Galactica to writing desks?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” In this, my wife closely resembles my Calculus professor who claimed that everything in Freshman Calculus was obvious. Maybe it’s obvious to them, but it’s not to me.

Early in our marriage, when I pressed for an explanation of why it was obvious, the answer caused as much confusion as it cleared up.

“Well, Starbuck kind of looks like my friend Lydia; you know the one at work, the one who keeps horses? The other day we were talking about horses at work and she told me that she was buying a new roping saddle for her daughter and she found it on-line for a lot less than the stores had it so she ordered it and she’s just hoping it will get here in time for her daughter’s birthday. So I told her about how we ordered mom’s writing desk on-line and she got it a week early. You see? Obvious.”

Right. Except for the part about my not being physically present for her conversation with Lydia, it was completely obvious. Over the years, though, I’ve become more zen-like in my approach to these dialogues. If the topic changes I drift along, clutching to the ideas I can grasp until the conversational current draws me closer to my wife again.

As it turns out, this was good training for when we had children. Not, as you might imagine, so we could understand them. Any parent worth their Pampers can tell you that understanding children is easy; what’s hard is keeping the children from understanding the adults.

This is important because children are strangely literal. If just once you happen to mention in passing that you might possibly be considering a visit to McDonald’s some time in the next twelve years, your young child will greet each new day with, “Are we going to McDonald’s?” Further, they interpret the word “No” as permission to ask the question again.

The only way to avoid this frustration is by not letting them in on the secret. Most parents resort to S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G. Unfortunately, my wife isn’t gifted in the spelling-in-the-air department. Her high school cheer leading career ended at the tryouts when she urged the team to F-I-T-G-H.

We had to resort to code words which was okay so long as we had agreed upon them in advance. Otherwise we were right back to, “So, when do you want to go to the place?”

“What place?”

“You know, that one place … next to the thing.”

“Which thing? The thing or the other thing?”

“Never mind. We’ll just go to McDonald’s.”