How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It

by Patricia Love

When a woman feels close, she can relax; when she feels distant, she gets anxious.

When it comes to relationships, women often mistake this guarded response, which many males retain throughout life, for lack of interest or even loss of love. Most of the time, he hasn't lost interest; he's merely trying to avoid the overwhelming discomfort of a cortisol dump that comes with hyperarousal.

It is not our innate differences in fear and shame that drive us apart; it is how we manage the differences.

What women have an even harder time understanding is this: For the average male, relationships are not a reliable source of comfort.

A woman might think of suicide if she feels that no one loves her; a man will do it if he feels that he deserves no one's love, because he's a failure.

We devalue those we love in an attempt to avoid our own shame or fear.

Of course, their self-protective feelings are unconscious. All they know is that they're pissed at each other.

Although we try to fool ourselves with words, it is body language, facial expressions, scent, and tone of voice that most influence emotional attunement.

Much of the resentment that occurs in relationships is not about material unfairness; it's about the perception that your emotions are controlled, if not manipulated, by your partner—he makes you anxious, and she makes you feel like a failure.

Men have a hard time giving the reasons they value their wives, because their wives are the reason they value everything

When you ask a man to watch the children, he often asks, “What should I do with them?” To him, watch the children means you can't do anything else. Women, on the other hand, complete multiple tasks while watching the children. That's why men play with children more than women—if he's going to watch, he might as well do something with them.

Teaching adult men emotional vocabulary will never give them the verbal fluency of women, just as learning a new language in adulthood cannot match learning it as a child and speaking it throughout life. Emotional words are a second language for him, and he'll speak it with a thick accent. No matter how much he tries, he just won't sound as natural and genuine as your girlfriends using the same words.

Here is a tough question that women need to ask themselves: Do you really want to know about his feelings or do you merely want him to validate yours and comply with your idea of connection?

Do You Want Him to Be Another Girlfriend or Do You Want to Be Closer to Him?

It was not the content of your talks before marriage that was so different, it was the high level of mutual interest you had in each other.

We communicate well with our intimate partners when we feel connected and poorly when we don't. When you feel connected again, your desire to explore feelings with your partner will practically vanish.

The challenge of being sensitive to your partner's fear or shame lies in the fact that these feelings most often are expressed as anger, resentment, criticism, or blame.

you must find a nonverbal way to connect and show that you value each other. It has to be nonverbal because fear and shame actually drain blood from the neocortex—the language part of the brain. If you try talking, you will either fumble for the right words or, more likely, use the wrong words and express something different from what you mean.

Compassion makes us sensitive to the individuality, depth, and vulnerability of loved ones. It makes us appreciate that they are different from us, with a separate set of experiences, a different temperament, and, of course, different vulnerabilities to fear and shame, all of which leads them to give different meanings to the same behaviors. For example, when a woman tells her partner that they “need to talk,” she means that she wants to feel closer to him. He thinks she wants to tell him yet again that he's failing her. Without compassion, neither of you can understand your differences, even though you certainly love each other.

You don't have to agree with the facts of your partner's point of view, as long as you give importance to the feelings associated with it.

Binocular vision is about holding on to self-value and our value of loved ones in the face of disappointment.