Are you and your partner communicating like strangers?

A psychological study of married couples and strangers has found that although couples think they communicate better with their spouse than other people, the reality can be very different; their communication is sometimes no more developed than if they were talking to someone they didn’t know.

But why would strangers be able to understand each other just as easily as partners who’ve known each other for years?  It has a lot to do with people’s assumptions. If you are very close to someone, this makes you more likely to overestimate how well they understand the things you are saying because you just presume that they have all the knowledge you have.  The same thing doesn’t happen with strangers and people will automatically provide more information, making it just as easy for someone they’ve never met to grasp what’s being said.

Boaz Keysar, a psychologist from the University of Chicago, has called this tendency to be overconfident when it comes to your partner the ‘closeness-communication bias’ and it was found all through the study, in which pairs of married couples and strangers were asked to interpret the meaning of the other person’s statements.

This shows up one of the key reasons many married couples, even when they’ve had years together to iron out their differences, still argue - getting closer to someone doesn’t always mean understanding them any better.   Couples often start to take the things the other person does for granted; how much they do at home, how thoughtful they are, what a great parent they make. But it also seems understanding can be taken for granted as well, leading to ‘crossed wires’ and potential conflict.   As one of the study’s researchers points out, “You get rushed and preoccupied, and you stop taking the perspective of the other person, precisely because the two of you are so close.”

Do you think that many couple arguments are down to miscommunication?  Do you struggle to get across what you really mean or do you often jump to the wrong conclusions about what your other half is saying?  For expert relationship advice that helps couples communicate effectively, visit thecoupleconnection.net.