4 Benefits Men Get From Listening to Their Wives
Listening is one of the most valuable social skills in the human emotional arsenal. Good listeners are able to draw from past conversational experiences to have better, more constructive conversations with friends and family. It is even more important for spouses and people with children to listen to each other. Healthy relationships are built on is communication, acknowledgement, and trust, and children can learn these behaviors from an early age. Here are a few benefits men get from listening to their wives:
Listening Helps You Understand Perspective
The only ways to understand the perspective of your spouse is to observe them, talk to them, and absorb their views. When men really listen to what their wives are saying, they become more attuned to the way that their wives think and perceive the world. Fights become less common, disagreements and issues are more easily solved, and communication becomes more personal. Very often, women are more prone to noticing situational details, and men could certainly learn a lot from their spouses in this regard. Relationships with children are much easier when you can be a team with your spouse and each pitch in your own perspective.
Listening Creates Healthy Families
Listening is an important way that people show that they care about each other: children who watch their parents listen to one another will have a healthier idea of how to act in their own families later in life. Showing your children that everyone’s opinion is valid and deserves attention is another useful behavior to display.
Love is demonstrated in actions and deeds, not words, so listening is one of the best ways to demonstrate love and good feelings toward the other spouse. Kindness and respect in family situations leads to kindness and respect from your kids in the future. Kids that see a healthy, back-and-forth relationship are more likely to take those lessons to heart as they grow up.
Listening = Learning
Many educational researchers believe that listening as a component of education has been severely underestimated by the academic community. Harvard Business Review commissioned a study that found that people are even worse listeners than we thought: immediately after the average person hears a talk or lecture, he or she only remembers half of what was said! After 8 hours, that percentage to about three-fourths of what was said, meaning that we only remember 25 percent of what our spouses said to us at breakfast after going through a full work day.
Marriage is difficult unless husband and wife make a concerted effort to learn about one another. Active listening is the best way to do this. It can be very elpful for men to master, even just to show the women in their lives that they care about trying to remember what has been said in the past.
Men Are More Effective When Focusing on One Task
Simply listening to their wives gives men a chance to avoid the thing that many of them are worst at: multitasking. There has long been a pseudo-scientific theory that women are better multitaskers than men are, but a study published in the BMC Psychology journal actually performed proper control-based research and came to a similar conclusion: women can navigate two or more simultaneous tasks better than men are able to. Concentrating on listening, and listening alone, allows husbands and boyfriends to excel by using their gender’s negative traits as a force for good.
Listening should be one of the primary concerns of both parties in a relationship. It is difficult enough to be understood as a unique human being, and that difficulty is compounded when proper listening techniques are not used in relationship and family-based situations. Men who listen to their wives are sure to be happier, more knowledgeable, and more in control of the direction of their families.
