Listening With Intent: Preparing the Soil for Love

At the end of our most recent State of Our Union meeting, Mark asked Dawna: "What's one thing I can do this week that would help you in your vocation?" Her answer: "Communicate. Communicate. Communicate."

It had been a rough week. Mark was finishing the last week of his summer online course, and the grading was absorbing most of his time. He was also working with a church in Oregon, 2000 miles away, to organize his father's funeral mass. The problem was that as Mark's stress increases, he retreats into his own head. And that's a problem because he fails to let people know what's going on. It's also a problem because he hears what people say, but often he doesn't really listen.

The week had been full of failures by Mark to follow through on commitments that he'd only half heard, and misunderstandings about when he'd be available for family activities because he hadn't shared his agenda.

In this Sunday's Gospel, Jesus tells a crowd a story about a farmer scattering seed. Some falls on hard ground and never takes root. Some sprouts fast but withers when the sun gets harsh. Some gets choked out by thorns. And some falls on good soil and yields a harvest beyond anything the farmer planned.

Jesus tells his disciples that the difference isn't the seed. It's the ground receiving it.

Your marriage works the same way. Our spouse is continually sending us messages, in words and in actions. The question is whether you are genuinely receiving what they offer.

We stop listening in predictable ways

Most couples don't drift apart because of one bad fight. Distance accumulates in small failures of attention. After the early years, when everything your spouse said felt essential, the familiar voice becomes background noise. Familiarity is a gift, but it's also a risk.

Research published by Dr. John Gottman and colleagues at the University of Washington identified a crucial relationship pattern they called "turning toward" versus "turning away."

This model focuses on the ways spouses "bid" to make a connection with their partner. A bid for connection is any attempt by one partner to get the other's attention, affection, interest, or emotional support. When one partner makes a bid, the other partner responds in one of three ways: they turn toward, they turn away, or they turn against.

Couples who remained together and reported satisfaction turned toward each other's bids about 86% of the time. Couples who divorced averaged closer to 33%. Gottman calls bids "the fundamental unit of emotional communication" in a relationship.

There are many kinds of bids.

• Bid for attention. "Hey, come look at this!" When a spouse points out something interesting on their phone or outside the window, it's not really about the object. It's a way of asking"notice my world for a moment."

• Bid for emotional support. I'm so exhausted — I don't know how I'm going to get through this week." This is an invitation for empathy and reassurance, not necessarily problem-solving.

• Bid for extended conversation."You'll never guess what happened at work today." The spouse is reaching out for genuine engagement and back-and-forth dialogue, not just a quick grunt of acknowledgment.

• Bid for play/humor. A wink, a playful shove, or an inside joke that only the two of them share is a way of saying, "Come play with me!" Sadly, these light, teasing moments are often missed bids because they seem trivial.

• Bid for physical contact. Physical affection is one of the clearest nonverbal bids, whether its coming up behind a spouse washing dishes and wrapping their arms around them, or reaching over to hold hands on the couch.

• Angry or frustrated bid. Even complaints and irritable outbursts can be bids. "You never listen to me!" can be a distressed partner's way of saying "I need you to reconnect with me." Gottman notes that even temper tantrums can function as bids in some situations.

And often, making bids isn't the issue. The challenge is the other partner noticing them.

What makes hearing and responding to our spouse's such a challenge? Remember the parable:

• Sometimes we're shallow. Because of stress, or just selfishness, want to focus on ourselves.

• Sometimes our enthusiasm wanes. Our spouse invites us, and we start to engage with them, but we lose interest and drift off. We disengage.

• Thorns grow quietly in marriages too. Work pressure, financial worry, the management of children and schedules: these do not announce themselves as threats to intimacy. They just fill the hours until there are no hours left.

Soil isn't always fertile. Sometimes it needs to be tilled, fertilized, and cleared of weeds so that it is ready to be seeded. How do we create fertile soil in our relationships?

Listening With Intent

One way is to simply practice listening.

One activity with solid research support is structured listening, sometimes called the "Speaker-Listener Technique." This tool was developed as part of the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) and is widely assigned to couples by marriage therapists. The Speaker-Listener Technique gives each of you a defined role, so one person is fully heard before the other responds.

It works like this:

1. Set up: Find 20 uninterrupted minutes. Sit facing each other. Put phones away.

2. The Speaker's job:

   • Speak from your own experience, using "I" statements rather than "you" accusations.

   • Keep each turn short, two or three sentences at most.

   • Speak about one thing at a time.

3. The Listener's job:

   • Say nothing while your spouse is speaking.

   • When they pause, reflect back what you heard: "So what I'm hearing is..."

   • Do not interpret, advise, or defend yourself yet. Your only job is to understand.

   • Ask your spouse: "Did I get that right?"

4. Then switch roles.

5. A few ground rules: Either partner can call a pause if emotions run too high. This is not the time to solve problems; it is the time to understand them. Problem-solving works better after both partners feel genuinely heard.

6. Start small. Choose a topic that matters but is not your most charged issue. Practice the form before you bring it to harder conversations.
   

The soil we tend

The disciples asked Jesus why he spoke in parables, and he told them that some people hear without understanding and see without perceiving. In our marriages, we can become that kind of listener without meaning to. We hear the words. We miss the person.

Good soil in a marriage is not a natural state you either have or you don't. You cultivate it by showing up with attention, week after week, to the person you promised to know. That kind of presence is one of the more serious acts of love available to us.