Talking to your wife is not the same as talking to a co-worker. Talking to any individual is not the same as talking to a group. And if just you are talking, only one person is communicating. In marriage, you may discover a lifelong study in how to effectively communicate with your spouse. Men can attribute this to the “unknowable” nature of women, but let's try to consider this from another perspective.

Women want to be known by their husbands, and they want to be understood. They want us to make the effort to try to understand them, and sometimes they will even offer to help us understand them. But God didn't create you or your wife to stay exactly the way you've always been. Even when you and your wife are doing what you're supposed to be doing according to God's will, you will change as you grow. This is not a bad thing, but it means that sometimes neither you nor your wife will know how to assist the other and understand changes in the best ways to communicate with each other.

When talking with your spouse, an important key to understanding her and knowing her as she grows is to “listen” to her. This serves more than one purpose. It can get you out of the all-too-common traps of the “you're not listening to me” arguments for sure. But it will also trigger the cues you need to understand about what is going on in her life that you need to be sensitive to. Making time to listen to your wife is important because she looks to you as a provider of far more than simply the gender-associated benefits of marriage and household maintenance. She also needs you to be her best friend, the one who understands her, and the one she can turn to when struggling with emotional or spiritual needs. Guess what big guy? You need her for the same exact thing. And if you've been listening to her, she's not going to be hesitant to listen to you as well.

When we talk to groups of people, we need as many of them as possible to understand our words. When we are with one person, we can focus on that person and hear their word, to meet their needs to be heard and understood. We will be able to speak as well, but we must respect the two-way nature of communication and try to understand our partners.

God set this up correctly in the beginning because the most critical element of a harmonious functioning relationship between the first husband and wife included communing with God in the Garden of Eden. While we cannot return to that physical location, we can restore a correct nature to the harmony we seek in our marriages. The foundation must be communion with God. When we see our spouses through the filter of the love God shows us, we will be capable of overcoming the obstacles to communication and marital harmony that plagues marriages attempting to succeed and survive without God.