When talking just isn't enough

Back when I lived in Brooklyn, way before I even thought about getting married and a year before I met my husband, I got some advice that has stuck with me. My landlord (a guy who defined the category of “wacko”) said, “Communication, Brianna, communication…this is the key to keeping a successful marriage. Remember this.” (I can hear the Brooklyn accent now.)

He may have been a strange guy and not a person that I’d attempt to model much of my life after, but he did get the communication message right. For those of us who are in healthy, loving and respectful marriages, I truly believe that communication is the key to continually finding the “love” in your relationship and evolving together as a couple.

So, what does communication mean? I think many times we hear the word “communication” and immediately think about talking with our spouse, sharing our emotions, etc. Yet, I’ve found over the years, that sometimes talking just really isn’t enough. For example, the year that my husband and I got married was a pretty stressful one, as it is for many. Simply put we were trying to do too many things at one time, from planning a wedding to buying a house to him finishing a Ph.D. to me growing business at Sylver Consulting. Most things were positively oriented, but still the stress levels were high. And in the stress we lost each other. At one point we felt so unconnected with one another that I really questioned if getting married was the right thing for us to do. I had a few sleepless nights over that decision.

Yet, instead of jumping ship, I took a step back and asked myself “Why is this happening to us?” We don’t generally fight, but we couldn’t seem to have a conversation where it didn’t end this way. That’s when a spontaneous conversation with a friend, Bill Hill, changed the course of how my husband and I have communicated with one another ever since.

Unfortunately, at the time, Bill and his wife were going through a divorce. In just trying to sort out his feelings about what went wrong he mentioned a personality-type test that he and his wife had done years ago. I can’t remember what the test was called. It doesn’t really matter at this point. What was intriguing to me was that the test essentially helped couples to understand how they connected to people, breaking things down into three categories of mind, body and spirit. © 2008 - Brianna Sylver - All rights reserved

It was a few days after this conversation that I created the game “Connection Points.”

© 2008 - Brianna Sylver - All rights reserved