Our Drive to Communicate

“We need this exit,” I abruptly told my husband. We had been deep into a friendly discussion and, not realizing the turn was so close, I had failed to give him my usual warning time.

“You’re wrong!” was his emphatic answer as he drove right passed the exit. Our friendly conversation was forgotten, the mood changed in an instant.

My husband and I were in the car—again—this time, on our way to Georgia to help our daughter-in-law settle into a new apartment while our son was otherwise engaged with the military. Thankfully, she was following behind us in another vehicle rather than listening to the debate in our car.

“I’m the one with the map!” I reminded him.

“We haven’t even gotten to the connecting highway, yet!” my momentarily confused husband disputed.

I explained to him, most emphatically, how mistaken he was.

He still didn’t believe me.

Then I got quiet and changed my tactic. I looked down at the map and started reading off the names of the roads we would be coming to next. Due to the fact I haven’t taken the time to get my glasses updated for far too long, he knows I’m not reading the signs along the road. I can’t even read them until we’re practically a car length away from them. This has, of course, contributed to our problems with me as navigator of this trip. But what would you rather have: a semi-blind person navigating or driving through unfamiliar, winding, hilly roads? My husband, wisely, designated me as trip-long navigator; I thought he’d at least trust me as such. After all, I trusted his driving.

Because the first 18 years of life trains a person to the unique way his or her family communicates, conversation styles brought into a marriage are often very different. Discussing daily activities and various topics at a healthy, marital level is an acquired skill that has not always been easy for my husband and me. For one thing, my husband understands his own feelings much better than I understand mine. He can tell when the temperature in a room plummets drastically, and he often presses, “Are you upset about something?” and I respond, “Yes!” Often, his next question is, “What about?” my reply is something akin to, “I don’t know, yet; I’ll let you know when I do.” This, of course, frustrates him. I didn’t even understand this was a problem until we’d been married a couple of years. Withdrawing and isolating had been modeled for me. Isn’t that how everyone communicates displeasure with their spouse? I thought so. My husband kindly informed me it wasn’t the way we would continue to share our feelings. I had to learn to communicate with words rather than punish him with my silence. So, on this day, like a good wife, I was talking….

“Next we will come across Highway 17, and then we’ll come across….”

“Okay, okay. You were right,” my husband conceded as he saw proof of our whereabouts, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

I accepted his apology and reached for my purse at my feet for my cell phone. I was going to call our daughter-in-law in the car behind us to inform her we’d be taking the next exit and changing directions (not for the first time on this trip, I might add). But, my husband saw what I was planning to do and quickly accessed his Blue Tooth attached to his ear. His silver blue eyes sparkled as he smiled and gave me a satisfied look that celebrated his quickness with his phone and also said he was quite happy to give our daughter-in-law his account of the turn around rather than mine.

“Hi! We’re going to be taking the next exit. We will be turning around and going back to catch an exit we missed.”

He was quiet while she spoke on the other end of the phone line, but I later found out she asked, “How far are we going back?”

To which he responded, “About the length of an argument.”

Funny. I wish all arguments could be cleared up in such a short length. Exiting arguments sure would be easier.