The Best Way To Improve Your Relationship

How couples can listen their listening skills

- Lisa Fields and Mamta Sharma

Five Years Ago, Shruti Malhotra*, a 31-year-old from Delhi, met a relationship mediator to work on some stressful communications issues she had with Sagar*, 31, her husband. The couple had been dating for seven years before marrying in 2009. “I never imagined our relationship would hit a low. It became hard to put forward a point without getting into an argument,” says Shruti.

“I thought it best to seek help from a third person who’d focus on our problem without getting emotionally involved,” she says. At first, Shruti attended the sessions alone; Sagar joined in two years later. Their sessions taught them to react more calmly, listen more openly and understand each other better. “They helped [the sessions] bring us closer,” says Shruti.

When you’ve got something to say, you want your partner to hang on to your every word. But often, it can feel like you’re being tuned out, especially if you’ve shared decades’ worth of mundane exchanges. And as much as you’d like to believe that you’re an ideal listener, you’re probably just as guilty of neglecting your partner.

“I think there’s a great hunger to be heard,” says Helen Ralston, chair of the International Listening Association’s business committee, who does her research near Oxford. “We’ve got the equipment to do it; most of us have two ears, a mind and a heart. And if there’s a great hunger to be heard, this suggests there’s very little real listening going on. Instead of listening, we are more likely to be waiting to offer our own point of view. Chennai-based psychiatrist Dr Vijay Nagaswami has seen this often in his practice. “We all have the need to be heard, not to hear out others,” he says.