Marriage, as well as other personal relationships, represents a challenging and intriguing context in which to examine communication structures. The marital relationship is characterized by strong emotions, and is also linked to societal expectations, requirements and demands. Developing and testing theories of human communication within long-term relationships such as a marriage is a good way for social scientists to test and validate these theories. Jean Wilson Houck and Richard W. Daniel writing in Journal of Humanistic Education & Development (1994) offer their theories about communication in a marriage. They write that how husbands and wives communicate with one another affects the development of their relationship, as well as their satisfaction with their marriages, and that spouses' perceptions of their own marital communication were an essential element in the progress, or in the deterioration of their relationship. They suggest that wives may have higher expectations for openness and sharing in the relationship, but that males often demonstrate less well-developed nonverbal and verbal communication skills. A different interpretation of the same facts would suggest that men prefer not to communicate intimately rather than men lack the ability to do so (Houck, Daniel, 1994, 21).
Most people believe that good communication is considered a key to marital happiness. Although married couples agree that good communication is one of the key to success, men and women often have different ideas of what good communication involves. For example, turning a cold shoulder can be just as harmful to marriage as open hostility. Intimacy avoidance is frequently cited as an example of communication breakdown between husband and wife. In his book, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray asks readers to consider that people often mistakenly believe or assume that if their partners love them they will understand their needs and behav...