Even the very best couples often gradually stop listening to one another, mostly because they assume that they’ve already heard everything before.
This habit even has a name, ‘closeness-communication bias,’ and to some extent everyone does it. We all unconsciously listen less carefully to the people we feel closest to, and that also means we start to miss crucial points about each other’s lives. A bit like how you stop noticing the details of the buildings alongside a road you know well.
But a couple is always changing, so not listening to each other means that eventually you two won’t really know one another anymore. It also discourages you from telling each other things, and is why couples often confide their most pressing and worrying concerns to people they know less well, even total strangers, rather than to their spouse.
Think of the things you tell your hairdresser, for example! We also actively avoid telling our spouse some things because we fear judgment, insensitivity or drama.
You might even have noticed this happening right in front of you, when your spouse unexpectedly reveals something that you didn’t know while the two of you were talking to someone else.
Your partner did that because the new person was listening differently than you do. Maybe they showed more interest, asked the right questions, were less judgmental or interrupted less. It’s not that either of you have become purposefully neglectful or inattentive, it’s simply human nature to become complacent about communicating with someone you feel you know really well. You also stop checking whether you’ve really understood something your partner’s just told you, and so the possibilities for miscommunication quickly grow.
So what can you do about all this? Start by just talking more! And asking more questions. And actually listening to the answers!
Because all too often spouses reduce their conversations to logistics. What to have for dinner. Who’s taking the kids to soccer practice. Maybe a mention of a success or difficulty at work. But no longer what’s really on each other’s minds. Your joys, struggles, hopes and fears. Mostly you keep your conversations light because you assume your partner already knows it all. But maybe you’re also afraid of what you might learn.
But what is love if not a willingness to listen to and be a part of another person’s life? Couples who’ve stopped listening also often end up saying they feel lonely, because they’re not having meaningful conversation any more.
Technology doesn’t help. Our phones constant distract us, and couples can be astonishingly inaccurate at interpreting each other’s feelings through messages and emojis. That’s because texts give you less information to work with because they’re so short, and cues like your tone of voice and body language are missing.
So to really understand the person closest to you, you need to spend more time with them, put down your phones, and really listen hard to what they have to say.
