This was an issue for me, in that I am perfectly comfortable not talking, but my husband wasn’t. He found it very frustrating that I wouldn’t converse with him. Even after I explained this “experiment”, he still found it annoying that during the little time we have together in the evening, I chose not to speak.
I found that I physically isolated myself and ignored my husband so I wouldn’t be tempted to ease the tension by trying to communicate in some non-verbal way, “substituting” gestures for words (Trenholm 2008 p. 113). However, that didn’t work very well. Subsequent to my telling him what I was doing, he twice came out to the kitchen where I was making dinner to ask me a question. The first time I just ignored him and he walked off in a huff. The second time he came out, I pointed to the open textbook on the kitchen table, and although he remembered our discussion, was still annoyed at my lack of response. He later said that he “supported my returning to college” but hoped there wouldn’t be too many times in the future where it interfered with our life together.
I found that this discussion directly fed into the next discussion of relationship development. Not only how we communicate but what is being communicated, are such an important factors in relationships. Should we not learn to navigate through effective forms of communication, we could find ourselves in “Duck’s Relational Dissolution Model” (Trenholm 2008 p. 157) going through the four phases of ending a relationship.
Trenholm, S. (2008). Thinking Through Communication, An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication (5th Ed). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.
