Communication Is Everything

Communication Is Everything

Posted to Relevant News by Amanda Lockhart on Sat, 06/18/2011 - 7:36am

If there's one simple truth about marriages — or any relationship, for that matter — it's that communication is everything. You get an idea just how important it is when you consider some numbers I saw from a Japanese survey.

According to these statistics, nearly 40 percent of Japanese married couples speak to each other less than 30 minutes a day. Slightly less disturbing, nearly half the women surveyed said they had contemplated divorce at some point.

Now, the numbers were collected by an insurance company. I'm not sure what motivation they'd have in showing that marriages are struggling. But the survey also found that the chief complaints women had about their husbands was that they smoked and drank too much. Maybe it's part of some healthy living initiative.

But let's not get bogged down in analyzing the numbers. I think the bottom line here is really very simple: A lot of married couples don't spent a heck of a lot of time talking to each other. I wonder what the results would be if you asked American couples how much time they spend every day talking to each other. Come to think of it, I take that back. I'm not sure I really want to know.