Perceptions, Emotions, and Nonverbal Expression
An additional element crucial to a harmonious marriage, is the understanding of how perceptions, emotions, and nonverbal expressions can affect your relationship. This can be very challenging and on occasion, even interfere with the effective use of words. Words can reflect attitudes, have levels of abstraction, and multiple intentions and interpretations, as well as deliver metamessages. Words have denotations, the dictionary definition, and connotations, what the word suggests or implies.
To communicate effectively with others, you must correctly relate words to the objects or ideas for which they stand. To improve your interpersonal communication skills, paying attention to your own nonverbal behaviors and those of your partner is crucial. Body language is a good example of non-verbal communication—various eye movements, body postures and facial expressions that we use, expand our capacity to express meaning.
Body language also augments verbal communication; and it is particularly useful, when communicating in face-to-face situations. Body language serves to enhance spoken communication by signaling such things as our attention, indicating whether we are bored or interested. However, the perception of body language can become difficult in certain relationships.
For example, those who become very close or who are married, have built-in assumptions. A recent study conducted by Boaz Keysar, a professor in psychology at the University of Chicago, determined that people commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. This closeness sometimes can lead to overestimating just how well you communicate with each other and creates misunderstandings.
Beware: Beliefs and Schemas
Do not take each other for granted. What is assumed to be true is a consideration of the lens through which your realities are being created, and to understand these unspoken assumptions, including beliefs and schema, you must be able to preview and understand this. Communication is highly entangled in perceptions, beliefs and emotions. Communication is also built on ideologies which tells us how to behave and agree.
So, a keen understanding of each others beliefs—what you are both assuming to be true--is another consideration to which your realities are being created. Always take the time to address this issue; it will serve you both well.
Evaluating appropriate levels of self-disclosure is satisfying to a stable relationship. The quality and quantity of marital communication and disclosure has been linked to the level of perceived satisfaction within the marriage. Self-disclosure is one type of marital communication that has been identified as a key factor in this development. Although quality communication is defined differently from study to study, most agree that happy marriages and self-disclosure go hand-in- hand.
Sharing private feelings, fears, doubts and perceptions is essential to self-disclosure and allows reduction of uncertainty and predicts how costly, or how rewarding, future interactions with your mate will be. Once you mutually determine that you want to establish a long-term relationship, disclosure continues and over time leads to more personal topics. Permitting one’s true self to be known can be difficult, yet to build a solid rapport in marriage it is imperative.
The Risk of Self-Disclosure
While self-disclosure can have many positive benefits; it can be risky, and can have negative consequences, true enough. Sharing information about yourself makes you vulnerable, and can be used to take advantage of you. However, it is the only way you can learn, feel, grow and have a meaningful, successful marriage.
Broadly speaking, empathy as a form of self-disclosure, gives us the ability to feel for another person, to imagine oneself in the same situation, enduring those same experiences and emotions. Empathy is also something you both will have to learn; you must have the mental flexibility to put yourself in the shoes of the other person.
Effective Interpersonal communication is often based on empathy, since interpersonal communication skills refer to how we interact with each other on a personal level. Whenever two people care about each other, as you do, they use many different interpersonal communication skills. Empathy is one of the most crucial skills that we all have and can use on a daily basis. Listening with empathy can help you express yourselves and feel heard, as well. Learn to improve your self-disclosure.
Empathetic listening will not only give you the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes, but also provide a supportive listening environment. Neuroscientist Jean Decety, believes that empathy is even a mirrored emotion and that empathy is one of those human impulses that defy easy explanation. It gets entangled with sympathy or compassion or commiseration; it submerges into altruism. Empathy requires emotional control—the capacity to distinguish yourself from the other person, a gift invaluable to experiencing closeness in a relationship such as marriage.
See Marriage Success: Tools to Help Your Marriage Succeed Part III
See Marriage Success: Tools to Help Your Marriage Succeed Part I
Join the Conversation