Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

Understanding Gender Differences in Communication for Better Connection

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 3 • Episode 52

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On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches how you can give your relationship a boost by talking in a way that helps your spouse to enjoy your conversation.

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Understanding Gender Differences in Communication for Better Connection

(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Making small changes in the way you talk to your spouse can create substantial improvement in your relationship. 

If you would like to challenge me right off the bat and say that I am stereotyping and that gender differences don’t always hold, I will be the first to agree with you.

Let’s not get overly concerned about the male and female aspect and seek to understand communication differences and how to do better. Okay?

(0:56)

You will want to consider whether these differences might exist in your marriage, regardless of who does what. If you and your spouse are opposite from what I say is generally true for men and women, the information will be just as useful. 

Gender differences…

Differ from person to person, just like physical characteristics

For example, if I say that men are taller than women, that doesn’t mean all men are taller than all women. What I mean is that most men are taller than most women. There are many cases where women are taller than men. Being tall and not so tall both have their advantages and disadvantages. At 6’2″, my height allows me to reach things in high places. Being much shorter than me, my wife has the advantage in being comfortable in airplane seats. When we travel, I really envy that.

(1:53)

Communication styles also present advantages and disadvantages. One spouse may be better at teaching a child how to drive a car while the other is better at handling emotional upsets. There are big advantages of having both a mother and father because of the many differences between them. Time has proven over and over again that God knew what he was doing in not making us all the same gender and pairing us up the way He did.

It’s both what you say, and how you say it

Have you ever considered that there are multiple facets to communication? Talking with your spouse is not just about the exchange of information. I often tell my clients that how we say something is just as important as what we say, though not more important. The fewer interactions they have with their spouses, the more critical it is that they communicate well each time.

People who wish to be skillful communicators need to work on:

  1. What they talk about, and
  2. How they talk about it.

(3:00)

These two factors will largely determine how much your spouse enjoys talking with you. That, in turn, will determine how much your spouse wants to do activities with you. 

Good Communication Goals

In relationships, we need to pay attention to four communication goals. 

In our marriage, communication should help us to:

  1. Get along,
  2. Build or maintain similarity,
  3. Foster trust and intimacy, and
  4. Provide needed information.

If talking were only about providing needed information, couple’s wouldn’t have much to say to each other. In business partner relationships, this is exactly what happens. New business like moving, a baby, a new house, or a new job stimulate lots of conversation. Over time, there is less and less that is said, because less needs to be said. Connection wanes. Love and romance disappear, even though sex and activities may continue.

(4:05)

One thing to notice here is that doing activities or having sex does not build emotional connection. It is emotional connection which makes these things enjoyable. Emotional connection comes before enjoyable activities and sex and is mostly fostered by talking. 

Once emotional connection has been lost, it again needs to be restored by talking. No amount of sex or vacation travel will ever do what good talking can do. 

Talking that builds connection is:

  • relaxed,
  • friendly, and
  • validating.

Talking about problems usually lacks relaxation, friendliness, and validation. For this reason, talking about problems does not rebuild emotional connection. On the contrary, it usually increases emotional distance.

(4:57)

The more we talk about relationship problems, the faster our relationships will deteriorate. The more we validate by being similar, agreeing, and empathizing, the more our relationships will build. You only need to try out these two approaches a few times before you see the reality of what really works.

Body language matters in talking with our spouse

If you only focus on the words, you may express things poorly or miss a lot of what your spouse is saying.

Changing your tone of voice or facial expression can completely change the meaning and effectiveness of what you say. People who talk in a low energy, monotone, generally come across as more self-absorbed, lacking in empathy, uninteresting, and generally unattractive. 

(In monotone) Changing your tone of voice or facial expression can completely change the meaning and effectiveness of what you say. People who talk in a low energy, monotone, generally come across as more self-absorbed, lacking in empathy, uninteresting, and generally unattractive. 

(6:07)

Being too energetic and emotional, on the other hand, can come across as fake or even dangerous. The unemotional person makes us relaxed to the point of boredom. The very emotional person prevents us from being relaxed.

The best way to moderate our voice and body language is to match the other person’s voice and body language, while looking interested, and friendly.

Words do matter in talking with your spouse

Besides our physical presentation, the words we use are either going to display that: 

  • We find the other person interesting, desirable, similar and capable,
  • that we have no interest in the other person, but only in our desires, or 
  • that we have contempt for the other person.

(6:58)

No matter how much contempt you may have for your spouse, showing it won’t build your relationship. Being loving is not always easy, but it’s still important to do.

When you talk with your spouse, strive to be relaxed and friendly, use a soft voice, and body language that shows interest. The way you look at and touch your spouse will communicate more about your feelings than your words will. Whatever you talk about, focus primarily on agreeing and empathizing. Try to listen twice as much as you talk.

It takes far more time to deal with the problems resulting from poor communication than it does to take a few extra seconds to have enjoyable conversation. Whether in the workplace or in the home, effective communication is always going to include elements that make the other person feel we like them.

Make sure your body language, words, and actions match

(7:56)

There never needs to be confusion in understanding what your spouse wants. All you have to do is look at the actions he or she takes. 

Actions speak more honestly than words.

If your spouse’s words don’t match his or her actions, there is no need to be confused. The actions are honest; the words are not. If your spouse is confused or finds it hard to trust you, then you have a mismatch between what you do, how you look, and what you say.

Just as consistently using good words with our spouse can be hard, so can having loving behaviors, and demonstrating our love with our eyes, our voice, and our touch.

Open and honest only works for words that build our relationship in some way. The rest of the time, we need to use some self discipline in what we say to our spouse just as we would with friends, customers, clients, and coworkers. That’s part of what prioritizing your spouse means. You’re going to talk to them as good as, or better than you talk to everyone else.

(9:03)

Men and women overlap, but not as much as same gender

Men often find it easier to talk with other men, and women often find it easier to talk with other women. Men may also find it easier to talk with their sons than their daughters, while women often find it easier to talk with their daughters than their sons.

Parents also need to keep in mind the gender differences in communication to make sure they are communicating in a relationship-maintaining way with their children. If you have trouble talking with either your spouse or your children, it may be that you are not adjusting to their communication needs.

Why should you adjust to them rather than training them to adjust to you? Because training people to talk the way you like is invalidating and distancing. 

We can sometimes train others to speak the way we like if:

  • They are desiring to have a better relationship with us, and
  • are willing to make changes. Or,
  • we use good boundaries to give them no other option, and
  • make sure to reward any positive changes they make.

(10:09)

Before attempting to teach your spouse how to talk to you in a better way, make sure that you are talking in a good way. We must always remove the log from our own eye before attempting to remove the splinter from someone else’s eye, as Jesus taught us, in Matthew 7:3-5.

How most men and some women communicate

Men are more focused on the subject than either the words or the process

Men are much more likely to focus on the subject of the discussion than on the way it is being discussed. They are less likely to notice or care about how the other person is feeling.

Men are more focused on facts than feelings

What happened and what was said tend to be much more important to men than how someone felt about what happened or what was said. This makes it much harder for them to empathize because they are not even aware of the feelings to empathize with.

(11:08)

I can ask a male client what he said to his wife and he can quickly tell me. If I ask him how his wife felt when he told her that, he will often say he doesn’t know or didn’t pay attention. He focused on the content, not on his wife or the way he was saying things.

Men often focus on getting their wives to take an action rather than on helping them to enjoy the communication. 

Men need to remember that the way to a woman’s heart is through her ears.

Men are results oriented

Communication is not an end in itself for most men. This is often true for dating or other activities as well. My male clients, who want to reconcile, are often so focused on getting their wives to give them a chance that they pay no attention to how enjoyable what they say is to their wives.

(12:00)

People want to be validated, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. The person who can do that is going to be the relational winner. 

We don’t need to lie to validate, but we must be willing to look for the truth in what the other person is saying, no matter how small. Then, we need close our mouth before the disagreement comes out.

Reconciling, like the initial courtship period before marriage, requires creating good interactions consistently. It is the good interactions that then lead us to marriage. Men need to learn that pleasing communication leads to their getting what they want much more than debating facts.

Men often prioritize being right over creating connection, except when first dating in a new relationship. That is because at that time, their goal was to be liked.

Men see problems as opportunities for solutions

(12:56)

If you ask men what the point of talking about problems is, they will almost always say, to find a solution. It never occurs to them that talking about problems is an opportunity to create greater emotional connection. They might make a plan about how to create greater emotional connection, but they wouldn’t see working together on the plan as connecting in itself.

Men want to move forward

Most men do not want to discuss the same topic repeatedly. It would feel to them like they were not making progress. This is much improved if they take the burden off of themselves to find solutions, and to simply provide validation.

For men, talking is much more for discussing than for pleasure, is for accomplishing a purpose or moving toward a goal. Having to have the same discussion feels frustrating or like a failure. Many men will shut down rather than to repeatedly discuss something because of the feelings of frustration and failure it creates.

(13:56)

How most women and some men communicate

Women are more focused on process than solutions

Women typically pay much more attention to eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. This often makes them more effective at expressing empathy since they pick up on the other person’s feelings.

Women can have a tendency to personalize tone and body language, when it is actually being caused by the topic at hand. A man’s angry voice when he is talking about a work situation could be anger at his wife, but is more likely because of the content he is talking about.

Women need to be careful not to dwell on single interactions, but to look at the overall pattern of their husband’s behavior. It will be helpful for women sometimes to remind themselves, he is a lousy communicator, but his actions tell me he loves me.

Actions are more revealing than words.

Women are more interested in relationships

(14:56)

Men enjoy relationships, for sure, but for men relationships are a means to doing activities and accomplishing goals rather than ends in themselves. Women tend to be more interested in their personal interactions than the activities they are doing.

An example to illustrate this might be a couple’s trip to the zoo. A man is more likely to be concerned about getting a good price, seeing as many animals as possible, and choosing the best route to walk around the zoo. He wants to go with his wife so they can accomplish these things together. He may walk ahead as he leads his wife around the zoo to achieve these goals. 

Women are more likely to be interested in sharing experiences through talking as they walk around the zoo. For them, the point of going to the zoo is much less likely to be about seeing as many animals as possible, as efficiently as possible. The point is not about enjoying the zoo–it is about enjoying each other, at the zoo.

(15:58)

I can take my wife to do anything as long as I help her enjoy our time together.

For women, problems are opportunities to communicate

Because women see talking much more as an opportunity for connecting than men do, they may bring up the same topic repeatedly–each time hoping to connect. A woman may disregard her husband’s increasing frustration with not having an action step.

Women may repeatedly bring up problems as an excuse to engage their husbands in conversation, which they enjoy just for the sake of having something to talk about. The experience of going to a counselor to talk about problems can keep some women going to a therapist for years, although none of their problems have been solved. This is a very good lesson for men who want to keep their wives seeking them out for years.

I have had some female clients over the years tell me directly that they just want my validation and not my solutions. I refer them to counselors. Coaching is for taking actions to reach goals, whether in sports, business, or relationships.

(17:05)

So, how can you use this information?

This information can help you to be mindful to include in your conversation elements that will help your spouse to enjoy talking with you. People tend to do this naturally when they are single and first dating, but then talk to their spouse as if they were the same gender after marriage. 

Regardless of whether you are a husband or a wife, pay attention to your own body language as well as your spouse’s when you talk. Send signals not only that you are listening, but that you agree and empathize. Don’t jump into talking about the facts of the problem, but take time to have some small talk and ease into issues, before again ending with small talk.

Don’t talk about problems that you both don’t agree on and when you do, make sure you come up with an idea for improving things. If you just want to share something, and your spouse tends to want to advise, then request he or she listen and empathize only, with no solutions. On the other hand, if you really want a solution, then make that known from the start. 

(18:11)

Practice doing problem solving methods if you typically talk a lot without ever finding answers. Practice talking about things without finding any solutions at all. Focus on just helping your spouse to enjoy talking with you. That’s especially important if you have a business partner relationship or only talk when some action is required.

Coaching can help you to talk better with your spouse.

Much of my work as a reconciliation specialist is helping people to know how to respond to things their spouse says. The way we respond is critical, especially when rebuilding a badly damaged relationship. I wrote one book on how to agree with difficult things spouses say. It is called Connecting through Yes! You may want to get a copy to work on your own validation skills.

(19:00)

Most of relationship improvement is learning to make little adjustments that make the relationship more enjoyable. What one small change could you make in your conversation as a result of what you have learned in this podcast today? Gradually introduce it in your conversation with your spouse and you will be amazed to see how much your whole relationship improves.

(19:24)

[Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.