How to Talk to Her
Picture this scenario. Your wife has just finished a major project. It could be something she accomplished at work, around the house or during her down time. The bottom line is she’s very pleased with the outcome. She put in quite a bit of effort and it paid off. When she shares her good news with you, you do which of the following:
a) hug and kiss her while you discuss how happy she is and proud you are for half an hour.
b) call out “That’s great, honey” as you plop down on the couch to watch the big game.
c) point out the things she has neglected because of the project that now need to get done.
d) immediately launch into a tirade about your own big work project until she walks away upset.
Now, if you are being honest, you’ll admit that your response to your wife will vary. We understand. You are human after all. Your reaction may vary depending on the mood you’re in or the context for the conversation or how your relationship is doing that given minute of that given day. There always seem to be mitigating circumstances.
What the Research Says
Does recalling your partner’s reaction to your positive news affect how satisfied you are in the relationship? That was the question posed in a recent eHarmony Labs online study. The results matched previous research findings that show how spouses respond to each others’ good news directly correlates with how satisfied they each are with the marriage.
That probably isn’t too surprising. After all, most people feel happier when others celebrate their good news. It’s just human nature to want to feel supported and respected and understood. But what may surprise you is that even small changes in a partner’s behavior can affect the way you feel about your relationship. Take a close look at the chart below.
So what does it all mean? Even just the memory of a partner’s enthusiastic response made people feel better about their relationships. That’s pretty powerful. Just imagine what it would be like if you responded to your partner with genuine interest and enthusiasm each and every time she told you about a good event (and she responded to you in the same way). Imagine how much rapport and good will this would generate between the two of you. Imagine how these positive feelings and associations would accumulate over time. How you would be able to recall these positive moments to sustain you through difficult times in your marriage. Experts agree being supportive in the moment can reap huge rewards in the dynamic between couples in the long term.
How to Care When She Shares
Your wife ever accuse you of not listening to her? Ever been slapped with the three little words, ”You don’t care!” that threaten to kick off WWIII? Most husbands would plead guilty. So how can you prove to your wife you are enthusiastic and supportive in the moment? Remember, it’s not about big sweeping gestures. Small changes can make all the difference. Keep these 3 little tips in mind and watch the dynamic with your wife improve almost instantly:
Be empathetic. Empathy can be defined as listening with your heart as well as your head. It means you are trying to truly understand what your spouse is thinking, feeling and experiencing. Put yourself in your wife’s shoes and see the positive event from her perspective. We assure you this is one of the greatest gifts a husband can give his wife. Every time you make the effort to empathize, you better understand your spouse’s meaning and strengthen your connection.
Provide feedback. Communication is a two-way street. One person talks, the other listens. How The response or feedback your wife receives indicates the message was (or was not) received and was (or was not) understood. “Go on, I am listening.” Or “I don’t understand what happened. Please repeat what you said.” Providing these kinds of simple statements as well as showing attentiveness with your eyes and body language, conveys to your wife that she is being understood – that you are genuinely interested in hearing the message she is handing you.
Be generous with supportive statements. We all like to feel good about ourselves. Period. When we give recognition to our spouses and we genuinely compliment their accomplishments, we reassure them of how important they are to us. We not only make them feel even better, we build a strong foundation of safety and rapport for future interactions. In fact, when we feel supported and are supportive, many of the other keys to good communication fall more naturally into place.
On your wedding day, you both promised to love each other in “good times and in bad.” Too often we focus on how we care of each other (or fail to) during tough moments. But it is equally important to put great effort into how you support each other during the high points. Think of it as making little deposits in an account that will pay big dividends over time.
Special message from eHarmony Labs researchers:
If you completed our study, thank you for your participation.
Your efforts are helping us improve relationships, one couple at a time.
Interested in completing the current eHarmony Labs survey? Take the survey now
(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading …Tags: Communication, For Men
14 Responses to “How to Talk to Her”
Leave a Reply
Interesting, but for some of us, perhaps, its just too late? How many times do we listen, congratulate, and celebrate with her, then see her head off to sleep away in her depression??
Hello
Can you be respectfully disagreed with?
If more men would take these suggestions to heart, life would be much better!!! It’s too bad the two men that responded are so down!
This is great, but how do you accomplish this if she already feels that you don’t care nor have any respect for her. I love her and I want to fix the problem, so that she will know that I really do love and respect her.
I think these are easier saidthan done but well worth the effort. to answer Alvin, you “didn’t care” over the course of weeks, months, years. put these into practice. i have personally been the biggest jerk to my wife by not caring. If you treat her like your queen she will make you her king.
From my experience if you suddenly start expressing interest in her accomplishments she may take your attemps as a form of manipulation. I think you need to be supportive of her accomplishments only offering a few compliments and making sure there are no criticisms. You can then re-introduce your compliments in future conversation to show that you were really paying attentention and really do care. If you are not genuine, she will see through your ploy so don’t even try if you don’t care. It comes down to re-establishing a trust between your wife and yourself. It will take some time, but I feel it is worth every minute you put into the effort. There is just nothing like having a wife that beams when her husband shows how much he appreciates her.
This seems to be a response that has to be mutually valued. If the wife doesn’t feel particularly complimented by the husband’s genuine efforts to recognize her, she likely will not recall this or value it enough to offer her positive response to his accomplishments as they occur. Accomplishments are not as significant in needing recognition to a wife as they are to a husband – by my experience.
Your tagline was interesting. Your article was routine and the same old thing and not very useful as well. I wish that this site offered more thanthe same spew.
{{{not a man-basher!}}}
here comes the woman’s point of view. or at least this woman’s point of view. accomplishments are special to each and every person, regardless of your sex (fred). mostly this article is just saying the same thing that women have tried to say forever. nothing new. we just want to know that our men care about us beyond what we can give them or do for them. ok, so we can cook and we can clean and work and give you children and take care of you when you are sick. but do we matter to you at all beyond all of that? if you had a maid who could do all those things, would it matter that it wasn’t your wife who did it? do we really matter to you at all? do we matter enough for you to look beyond your bad day so that you can be happy for something big, or even not-so-big, that we are proud of? do we matter enough for you to turn the tv off and look at us in the eyes and tell us how excited you are for us?
and for john, if you are genuine when you give praise to your wife and you really aren’t manipulating her, she will figure that out. don’t hold back. she knows that you are holding back and it hurts. throw every good thing you have at her. tell her every good thing you can about her. she may look at you funny the very first time you do it. but, i guarantee, by the tenth time you do it, she won’t be looking at you funny anymore. there is no need to ease into being nice to her. just be nice to her. be good to her. things like that come back to you. if you want her to enthusiastically love you, then love her enthusiastically. but if you want her to just stay with you and stay out of your way, then treat her the same way. she will get the point either way. but which way will you (both) be happier?
I was looking for the main thing that makes me crazy! Feedback for guys usually means they give us advice on what we really SHOULD do, or SHOULD’VE done. It wrecks any compliments. Totally wrecks them. Feedback like that says “I’m patting you on the head and giving you a smiley sticker to wear on your dress, but the way you SHOULD have done it is ‘xyz’. Seriously…that is just as bad as ignoring us. As soon as I hear the words “maybe next time” or “have you considered” I am through thinking anything pleasant. Just HOLD the advice, ok guys? Maybe keep it in your back pocket for a few weeks and then offer it up.
This article is all well and good, except that I do compliment my wife on a job well done, and show that I am interested. However, often times she will start complaining about how she wasn’t able to accomplish this or that other task because of the time required to complete her project. Then she will go off on how many thousands of things need to be done, and how her project isn’t very good anyway.
Of course I see an opposite issue too. When I complete a project, which I am happy about, often times she will complain to me, “why did you do it THAT way” or “what WERE you thinking?” etc. etc. Don’t get me wrong, she is not negative like that all the time, but it is such that I have no desire to tell her about anything I have completed, as I do not wish to hear about what I did wrong.
This response goes to what Alvin had to say. When your wife thinks you don’t care anymore, you must set her down and tell her from your heart how much you do care and how much you love her, and you must show true remorse for the areas you have failed at. Just as true repentence shows God we are sorry, this will show your wife that you are serious, and want to make things right. Remember that actions must speak too, following your words.
Okay Jeremy,
What if you treat her like a queen but she just has blank affect, doesn’t respond. Almost as if she’s deaf. then she wanders off because your reaction wasn’t as big as it should be, or it was too big and so it had to have been fake, or it wasn’t the exact same words she was expecting or hoping you’d say so it upset her, or, well, I hope you get the picture. It’s like you’re darned if you do, and darned it you don’t. (paraphrasing, of course!) After your “gift” being rejected so many times, it makes it hard to keep giving. Because it makes no difference what I say, or how I react, it is going to be met with some negative response. Not always, I’m not saying that but 75% or the time or more.
This comment is for “lady”. You say to just jump in and be nice and she will see your niceness and respond in kind. (paraphrazing again). My first wife would get visibly upset if I did nicethings for her. I sent roses to her work and she accused me of trying to look good to her friends so they would think she had a sweet husband. I offered her a piece of carpet to kneel on one time when at a project and she was kneeling on concrete. she got angry, shot me a dirty look when one of the ladies mentioned something about chivalry. I used to do nice things for her all the time but she just had a huge chip on her shoulder and always seemed to take the things I did for her the wrong way. I promise, I was just trying to be nice. Goes to show you what’s normal for one person is ‘out there’ for another.