What! My Marriage is Tone Deaf?!
Having been married for a quarter of a century, I’ve spent a good deal of time around couples. One of the things that has always fascinated me is how spouses speak to one another. Some do it with kindness. Others, with the abrupt emotional volatility of a small explosion. I’ve observed couples who speak to each other with such banal familiarity that there’s little room for empathy or pre-consideration of their words. I have relatives whose only tone is angry-yelling. And I have friends who don’t really speak at all, but communicate more through unenthusiastic grunts.
Does it matter? Is tone an indicator of the state of your relationship? Or, is tone more of a dialect that’s regionalized in the micro society of your household? In my experience, yes. (To all three.) Tone impacts the very way we experience being in a relationship. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, how we speak communicates our level of care, honesty and state of emotion. Imagine a scenario in which you’ve cleaned up the kitchen counter where your spouse had left a few tools. A voice yells from the kitchen, “MY HAMMER IS MISSING!! DID YOU PUT MY HAMMER SOMEWHERE?!!” Consider the impact of that tone: your thoughtful act of cleaning has been ignored, you feel “lashed out” at, you sense your spouse’s frustration and impatience, your cortisol level rises, and because you’ve been yelled at, you naturally want to scream right back. It’s a whole mixed bag of emotions resulting from just two sentences. Now imagine your partner’s tone was completely different. They calmly pop into the room, smile and say, “My hammer is missing. Did you put my hammer somewhere?” It’s so much better! But even better still would be pre-considering the words, and delivering them with a loving tone. “Hey, thanks for cleaning up. I think I left my hammer out. Do you know where I can find it?” In this scenario, you feel appreciated; even helpful. The only emotional outcome is positive. And the end result is exactly the same – finding the hammer.
Is tone an indicator of the state of your relationship?
Every time we speak to one another, we have the opportunity to do so in a loving way. Consider the alternative of being tone deaf – where dozens of interactions per day cause dozens of negative emotions in the relationship. Over time, they compound until we perceive the entire relationship as being stressful, loveless or hurtful. Even though many couples justify their household dialect as “just being the way we’ve always talked to each other” I have to wonder how much more joy they could be experiencing simply by paying more attention to their tone. One study in 2015 at USC found that while words can be deceiving, tone of voice cannot. The study used an algorithm to predict the outcome of one hundred marriages based on the tone of interactions recorded in therapy sessions. In a five-year follow up, the A.I. had a 79 percent accuracy.
Here’s the good news. Tone deafness in a marriage, or in any relationship for that matter, is entirely curable. Our choice of delivery, and our choice of words, is 100% within our control. In fact, when I took on my latest project to write a book about marriage, I wanted to create a way for couples to master a more thoughtful language and tone, immediately. So I devoted a great deal of the book to carefully pre-written sentiments which are kind, empathetic, meaningful and constructive. Then I included a simple means of delivery – a bookmark. That way, expressing how you feel is as easy as marking a page in the book and leaving it for your partner to discover. The tone is unmistakably loving. And it’s easier to receive your loved one’s message when it’s preceded by the words on the cover. “Hey, I Love You…”
