Sublime

“Sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.”

Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse’s perspective.

You will seek understanding and reconciliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened.

and patience on your part as she learns to speak a language that’s foreign to her.

She didn’t want advice; she just wanted to know that I understood.

3. listen for feelings.

One way to learn new patterns is to establish a daily sharing time in which each of you will talk about three things that happened to you that day and how you feel about them. I call that the “Minimum Daily Requirement” for a healthy marriage.

8. Ask if there is anything you might do that would be helpful.

Thus, a request creates the possibility for an expression of love, whereas a demand suffocates that possibility.