Several years ago, Leslie Parrott was headed out of the house to do some shopping. She put the children in their car seats and backed out of the garage. About a block away from the house she realized her youngest had fallen asleep. She decided to take him back home and let dad take care of him while she shopped. She pulled in the garage, opened the passenger door, grabbed the car seat with her child in it and took him upstairs to her husband. Then she ran back downstairs, jumped in the car and backed out of the garage only to hear a terrible screeching noise. At that moment she realized she had not closed the passenger door and now it was sitting in the middle of the driveway.
“I heard this awful noise and ran downstairs to see what had happened,” said Les Parrott, co-founder, with his wife Leslie, of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University (realrelationships.com) and author of numerous books on marriage and parenthood. “When I got to my wife, she was crying and just staring at the car and the garage, which were both totally messed up. I realized at that moment that it was not going to help the situation any for me to start yelling at Leslie. Instead I put my arms around her, held her and said nothing.”
If there were two things the Parrotts could magically give to couples to enhance their marriage relationship they would give them the gift of empathy and good communication.
“One of the most powerful things a couple can do to enjoy a deeper and more satisfying connection with each other is simply to put yourself in the other person’s shoes,” said Dr. Parrott. “Empathy is the heart of love. When you are able to think about things from your spouse’s perspective it really changes your relationship. Couples tend to be less critical of each other and nag less frequently. Conflicts tend to short circuited – not to be confused with not having any conflict - and you become better friends.”
The second area the Parrotts believe can transform a marriage is good communication. A national survey of couples revealed that the average couple actually talks less than 17 minutes a week to each other.
“One of our friends told us he and his wife, in managing their household of four children, feel more like air traffic controllers than husband and wife,” said Dr. Parrott. “Busyness deludes us into thinking that we’re conversing when we are actually just trying to hold on to the hectic speed of our day. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
As hard as people say they are searching for more time to do things like talk with their spouse, the dirty little secret that most know in their soul is that there really isn’t any more time to be found. We just have to figure out how to spend our time differently.
“If spending time talking with your spouse is a priority you have to put it before other things in your date book,” said Dr. Parrott. “Robert J. McKain once said, ‘The reason most goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first,’ Leslie and I believe he hits the nail on the head. We say that our marriage comes first, but that doesn’t matter if we devote our time to what is lower on our list. Making your marriage a priority is the secret to reclaiming the conversations you have been missing together.”
