Reconnect to Rescue Your Marriage

I don’t know what my wife means by ‘more romance’ and ‘better communication!’

You are not the first man who doesn’t realize that there is a problem in his marriage, that is until his wife threatens to leave it because he just doesn’t give her what she needs. Then he is frantic to figure out how to keep her.

The problem is that you love her, but she just doesn't seem to get it. Besides that, she doesn’t seem to appreciate how much you actually do for her. If you only could figure out what she wants, you would bend over backwards to do it.

When you don't know how to communicate or be romantic the way your wife wants you to be, it’s important to find out, specifically, just what she really wants.

When you try to fix things by buying her beautiful gifts, she gets mad because it's not in the budget. Then you try to tell her how she should appreciate your efforts and things only get worse. It's almost as if the words she's using are in a language you've never learned. They don’t seem to mean what you think they mean.

When your communication goes around in circles and nothing is ever settled you get scared. You try to figure out what to say next and you end up defending yourself over and over again. Meanwhile, she keeps trying to explain what she wants from you while you think you are already doing it. Even though you love each other, you are both frustrated because you can’t get through to each other.

If this is happening in your marriage, it’s time to try something new, a different type of communication. It’s time to try listening to her without talking about what you believe and what you think is right. Listening this way is a skill that anyone can learn, but it does take self-restraint. It will mean not defending yourself even when it clear that she doesn’t understand the situation.

She does understand the situation, she just understands it differently than you do. It’s now your new job to discover how she sees things instead of trying to make her understand how you see things.

You do this by telling her that you want to set aside some time, perhaps an hour, to try to understand what she wants by JUST LISTENING TO HER and not talking about yourself. That, by itself, may seem romantic, especially if you do it in a candlelit space.