A little communication here

By Scott Williams

In addition to publishing Culture Watch, I also create a weekly poll for FamilyLife.com. I can generally anticipate what the results will be, but a recent poll was a bit of a surprise.

Have you given your mate a love note in the past month?
Yep, a full-blown letter/card	14.2%
I've scratched out a quick note	15.7%
I sent one electronically. Does that count?	15.7%
Ouch! It's been that long?	54.5%
Total Votes: 134

I was sure that very few readers would have written a full love letter or card to their spouse in the past month, but fairly certain that most would have at least scribbled a note or sent an email or text message. So to find that five out of every nine people who took the poll haven't sent any kind of love note in more than a month was a bit of an eye opener.

I noticed this troubling sign just before we entered our weekly planning meeting for our emagazine, The Family Room.  Less than a half-hour into our meeting, I made another similar discovery. We were comparing the average pageviews for articles within FamilyLife.com's Healthy Marriage topic. All of us there were a bit surprised that Loneliness and Isolation ranked #1. Communication, on the other hand, was way on down the list. How ironic.

It seems that in our individualistic, consumerist culture, we want others to reach out to us but don't feel a compelling need to make the effort to reach out to others. When our spouses aren't noticing us or "meeting our needs," we may tend to get resentful, which often causes us to shut down communication and retreat to our own bitter feelings. The result is loneliness and isolation.

The antidote is communication. When lines of communication are open, those petty squabbles, minor annoyances and simple misunderstandings don't have the chance to fester into full-blown bitterness. In fact, they become opportunities to relate to each other in a much more personal way, sharing feelings that might never have been discussed had the situation not required you to deal with the cause of the grievances. Once the problems are resolved though, your relationship becomes closer, and you've established a new tone of openness and healthy communication for the next time a disagreement comes along.

I invite you to check out the wealth of articles on FamilyLife.com. Sure you can check out the Loneliness and Isolation articles, but your time might be better spent proactively looking at the tips on communication.