Learning to "Contextualize" is the Real Secret to a Happy Marriage

My husband and I have been married twenty-four years, not all of them peaceful.  In our travels through Europe, Asia and Africa, we've taken copious mental notes of cultural differences in how couples communicate. What we learned was priceless.

 We Americans sometimes bring a certain arrogance and pigheadness to our observations of other societies, which make it difficult to master the lessons other cultures have to teach.  If we come across statistics that the divorce rate is low in a particular country, we rationalize that the wives in that country probably spend their day cowering behind the kitchen stove, lacking a legal escape such as divorce, from their husbands' brutishness.  Of course, spousal abuse can and does happen anywhere.  But what we in America and other western countries have been overlooking is an amazingly simple prescription for improving the state of our relationships.   The term is called "contextualization."  It has been used in linguistics for decades, but is only now being valued for the insights it offers troubled relationships. 

Divorce rates are characteristically low in high-context societies, usually those found in Asia.  The highest rates of divorce will be found in more individualistic low-context countries such as the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada.   This is so regardless of whatever religious strictures a particular society may have against divorce.  So what does high and low-context mean?  It refers to whether a culture gives greater value to  non-verbal cues (high context) or to the use of words (low context).  High-context cultures place greater emphasis on non-verbal forms of communication.   Just as all human children learn language, members of high-context societies are also socialized to read a person's subtle gestures, to look around and size up a situation without having to verbalize what's happening.

The nearly ubiquitous advice of marriage counselors in the West, is that couples whose relationships are in trouble, should work on their communications skills.  But it's a dangerously false mantra. The problem with verbal communication is that not only do people lie, but more often than not, in emotionally charged situations, they lack self-awareness.  They don't know why they're behaving the way they are.  To the often heard complaint of one partner to the other:  "well, I can't read your mind," the answer is you don't have to.  Humans signal their desires and intentions in a multitude of non-verbal ways.  The language of love is so often wordless.

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