Communicating With Opposite Sex

Each of us came from a man and a woman, a mother, and a father. Our parents or the people who raised us had an important impact on our development. Each of us may have had one or more sisters or brothers who also had an impact on who we are. And each of our parents was also influenced by the family she or he was born into, the personalities and life situation they encountered, the struggles they had, the learning they brought to these struggles and passed on to their children.

The point is whatever you grew up with; who your parent were, the kinds of lives they led, they way they related to each other and to you has been handed down to you and affects your attitudes and your sense of loyalty, direction, and responsibility. What you learn from your family still affects your life today. By recovering impressions, memories, and associations, you can open up your choices. You have little choice about how to change your behavior until you reflect on who you are. Our life scripts are shaped by the early lesson we learn from our family. I remember, when my mother use to advise me that proper communication is the key in establishing and maintaining a deep and satisfying marital relationship. It is the cornerstone of marriage. It reinforces trust that allow the partners to keep growing and acts a method by which you can share your problems, frustrations, fear, anxieties, hopes, and successes with the person who should be your best friend; your spouse.

Being married for five years, l has seen that effective communication is a requirement for effective problem in an intimate relationship. How we communicate is the problem more often than what we communicate. If the way we communicate do not work with our partner, then our message of concern, and hope, and love may not get through. Without clear communication, we cannot make our needs known and we cannot negotiate to meet them. We must genuinely consider the feelings of our partner as well as our own; if our message are not moderate by tact and sensitivity, then the reactions of our partner may block the message we intend to send.

Marriage deservers a rich communication. Even as an "option" for men and women, it is still the dominant choice for old and young alike. In an intimate relationship there are ways to communicate that are useful and ways to communicate that are harmful. It is useful to be direct, saying what you need to be said; it is harmful to be indirect, with subtle hints and ambiguous statements out of context. It is useful to be clear and precise, spelling out exactly what we mean; is harmful to be vague, leaving it to out partner to figure out what we mean. It is useful to specific, giving concrete detail or example; it is harmful to be general, leaving plenty of room for partner to misunderstand. It is useful to be honest, to say what is really in our heart; it is harmful to be dishonest, to say half of the truth, to lie outright. It is useful to be respectful, to recognize the right of our partner to their own beliefs, their own feelings, their own decisions; it is harmful to be controlling, using communication to bend our partner to our will. It is useful to be tactful; it is harmful to be insulting, damaging our partner's sense of self-worth.

What get in the way of direct, clear specific, honest yet tactful communication more than anything else is our own history. Some of us learned to be tactful. Other of us learned to use honesty without empathy to aggressively control those around us. Like l said in the beginning, we all learned from our families and our other unique life experiences that certain ways of communicating worked, and these ways became styles that we now accept as part of the way we are. Many of these styles have been useful in much of our lives, so we need not discard them thoughtlessly. What we do need to do, in our relationships with our partners and our children, is to look at these patterns of communication we adopted, asking ourselves as adult which style we want to keep and which styles we want to change.

Some feeling may be difficult to communication in ways that do not destroy love. For many of us, anger is the hardest to handle in our relationships. But we need to learn to communicate our feelings, all of them, in ways that are not destructive. For suppressed feelings leak out, they may show themselves in our expressions in our movements, in the closeness or distance we maintain in our relationship.

Mind reading is the enemy of clear communication and understanding. In an intimate relationship, we cannot expect our partner to know what we want without asking for it. If you loved me you would know" doesn't work because our partner is either wrong, or gets tired of playing a guessing game. On the other hand, if we constantly hearing something different from what our partner actually says, because we already know what they really mean, then they will get tired of trying to heard.

A number tools have been develop which help us to communicate in ways that help our relationship. These tools help us to express what is really there in ways that do not alienate our partner, but rather build the trust and closeness on which an intimate relationship thrives.

In the end, the only useful ways to communicate are those, which actually lead to a successful resolution of the issues in question. This means communication based on mutual acceptance, respect, openness and trust.