Effective listening is essential to opening you and your partner up to new levels of intimacy.  Unfortunately,  often we haven’t learned how to listen to a member of the opposite sex in a way in which the other feels honored, appreciated for who he/she is, and heard.  This month in our Understanding the Opposite Sex Relationship Study Group I am teaching three effective techniques for listening.

Men are frequently frustrated when a woman asks them a question.  Not by the question, but by what happens next.  Typically a woman will ask a question, something like, “Where would you like to go on our vacation this summer?”  The man gives this question serious thought and consideration.  He knows the answer matters to his partner and wants to provide a good answer.  He also, in this case, is being given an opportunity for self-expression.  So, the man “puts on his thinking cap.”

The woman waits a little while for his answer, but to her it seems like a long time has passed and she’s worried about why he didn’t answer right away.  She thinks maybe he didn’t hear the question or didn’t get it.  So, she interrupts his thought process with a clarification of her question.  “Would you like to go to the beach again?”

The man then attempts to take in this new question/information.  His thought process is actually interrupted and derailed by the second question.  He now has to incorporate a response to the second question along with his original response that was in the process of being formulated already.

Well, to the woman, the time it takes for this process is entirely too slow–if she’d asked this question of her girlfriend she’d have a few options on the table by now.  She thinks, well, maybe “essay” questions are a little too hard for him, perhaps it’s time for “multiple choice.”  She interrupts his thought process again, this time suggesting a few options to choose from, like “Well, if you don’t want to go back to the beach this summer, maybe we could take a camping trip in the mountains, or would you like to do something completely different and go to Hawaii?”

By now the options offered by the woman could be so completely off the track from the man’s original answer that it seems hopeless to him to explain his original answer now.  Usually at this point, he’ll say “forget it” or “never mind” and look really annoyed.  It’s likely he’ll just choose one of the options you mentioned, just to avoid having to explain it all, because it’s so difficult to get his ideas on the table.  And the woman later complains to her girlfriends that “He’s just so uncommunicative!”

What she doesn’t realize is that her constant interruptions, new questions, clarifications and options derail his thought process.  It isn’t that he doesn’t have a preference, opinion, or ideas.  It’s that she hasn’t waited long enough for him to develop those ideas and present them back to her.  His self-expression is cut off at the pass.

There is a better way for women to listen to men.  It’s called Waiting for the Well.  I’d love to share it with you.  Sign up for my Relationship Study Group–under the Events Tab.