There are few things more discouraging than coming to your spouse with something exciting to share and being met with a blank stare. Or saying what a disappointing day you’ve had and being told to be more positive.
In relationships, you want to be understood. You want your spouse to feel what you feel, to validate the experiences that you’re having. It can be devastating when that doesn’t happen. But if you’re able to cultivate empathy, you will be able to find more stability and intimacy in your marriage.
What is Empathy?
More than simply hearing someone else, empathy is about being able to take on their perspective almost as if it were your own.[1],[2] You can stand in their shoes and see the world through their lens. It’s about being able to fully understand what a situation is like for someone else.[3]
It’s not enough to feel sorry for the other person. Empathy is not the same as sympathy. Experiencing empathy is telling them that you can feel their pain and understand why they feel it, not merely feeling sorry that they are in pain. Showing empathy in this way validates their experience, telling them that it’s understandable to feel this way.
Empathy doesn’t necessarily require you to agree with the other’s perspective. If your spouse is furious with how a friend treated them, showing empathy doesn’t mean you have to be angry at their friend. But it does mean being willing to listen and understand the reasons for their anger. It means acknowledging that it makes sense they would be upset.
It can be challenging to feel the ups and downs of another your spouse’s experience. But if you take the time to hear them out and put yourself in their shoes, you can offer them something valuable: being seen and understood.
Why Should You Empathize?
In marriage, empathy brings a broad range of benefits to the table.[4] Being able to show empathy to your spouse is a big part of being able to have a well-adjusted and stable relationship. When you can understand their perspective, you will be able to better adjust to married life, reducing the possibility of divorce.
Empathy is a skill that you develop, and some marriage counselors even suggest empathy training for newlywed couples. For some, it comes naturally, but training can help individuals be more understanding despite not learning this skill as children or even as adults. And everyone can benefit from further developing empathy, as it provides new and more profound ways to communicate and interact.
Research shows that becoming better at expressing empathetic understanding often leads to improved relationship satisfaction. After all, feeling understood meets a deep need that can’t be found anywhere else.
How Can You Build Empathy?
There are three primary building blocks to help expand in your capacity for empathy:[5]
1. Honesty
To see things from your spouse’s perspective, they first have to be able to share it with you. If you want your spouse to understand you, you need to be open and willing to share your perspective with them. Looking for your spouse to feel what you feel? You have to be honest about how you’re feeling.
So dishonesty gets in the way of allowing yourself or your spouse to extend empathy. Sometimes it creeps in for genuine reasons. You might want to protect your spouse from the stress of your work life, so you choose to say that you’re okay after you come home.
But you need the courage and willingness to expose even the most carefully hidden parts of you to your spouse. If you want to have a deeper relationship, you need to be honest and vulnerable enough to share everything with your spouse, not just the easy stuff.
2. Compassion
While similar to sympathy, which was defined above, compassion goes beyond just feeling bad for someone. It’s about genuinely seeking to understand for the sake of helping the other.
Compassion helps to develop your empathy because it provides a caring motivation for doing so. When you can feel for your spouse, you will be able to start feeling with them. When you emotionally engage with and respond to what your spouse is feeling, you provide a fantastic way to have experience intimacy with one another.
3. Equity
One of the reasons to contrast empathy with sympathy is that sympathy can easily lead you to assume that you know better. When your spouse comes crying to you, it’s easy to think that they are only feeling this way because they don’t have the insight that you do in the situation. And somehow it’s up to you to educate them how to react correctly to their situation.
However, this assumption actually keeps you from feeling what they feel. If you don’t treat them with the same level of respect as you treat yourself, you will dismiss their perspective instead of understanding it. Equity is about being fair and impartial. Your spouse deserves someone able to listen and show empathy as an equal, and when you are that person for them, you help build a deeper relationship.
My Spouse Can’t Do Empathy!
So what are you supposed to do if you can’t see any capacity for empathy from your spouse? You need to remember that empathy is developed. Maybe in their home growing up, that wasn’t a value that was encouraged. Perhaps empathy wasn’t something offered to them, so they never learned how to be empathetic.
Certain personality disorders can make it difficult to show empathy, but it’s quite rare for a person to be completely unable to show empathy. Only sociopaths and psychopaths are like this. So odds are that your spouse just needs to learn how to develop her empathy skills.
Or, what happens when your spouse is more empathetic to others than to you? It’s understandable to feel offended at this, but it’s possible that this doesn’t mean they value others more than you. Researchers have found that some people have learned to express empathy in specific contexts and relationships more than in others.[6]
Rather than assuming to know why they do this, see it as a chance to show some curiosity and build empathy with them. Try to find out why they show empathy in some situations and not in others. In discovering this, you can better understand them as you help them better understand you.
Instead of assuming that they can’t or that they refuse to show empathy to you, take the opportunity to help them do a better job of expressing empathy in your marriage. By doing this, you will help build intimacy together.
Empathy Exercise
We put together a game to help explore the differences between empathy versus sympathy versus what is just plain unhelpful. If you join us on Patreon, you can use this fun activity to help both of you understand one another and start to think empathically.
How to Empathize for Deeper Intimacy
Now that you know the foundation and broad strokes of empathy and its relationship with intimacy, here are three tangible strategies to apply in your marriage:
1. Focus on Your Spouse
You need to show through actions that you truly believe that it’s not all about you. It’s not just an external signifier, as you do need to internalize this. But your spouse needs to see you demonstrate this behavior.
To achieve this, you actually will have to temporarily put your own ideas and feelings on hold.[7] As you do this, you will be building a relationship where your spouse will begin to reciprocate, giving you the time and space to share your ideas and feelings as well.
For example, what do you do when they tell you a story about how crazy their day was? Do you counter with how much more insane your day was? Or do you listen and ask questions, affirming them as you show them understanding and empathy?
Remember that you need to focus on your spouse. As much as you want to talk about your own experience, you need to make sure that you are meeting the needs of your spouse. If you use their opening up and sharing of their lives as a chance to talk about yourself, they might give up. They won’t feel listened to, and you’ll lose an opportunity to deepen your intimacy through empathy.
But if you take the time to hear them out and validate their feelings and experience, they will feel loved and acknowledged. And maybe that will open up a perfect time for you to share the craziness of your own day.
Just as long as you remember that it’s not all about you.
2. Listen To Understand
A major pitfall when you start trying to listen to your spouse is listening in order to respond. You may have the perfect response or illustration for the conversation; you’re just waiting for the opening. But listening to respond isn’t actually listening.
When you do this, you miss out on important moments in your conversation. You miss out on the core needs of your spouse. They might be desperate to hear affirmation, but you’re so focused on what you have to say that you miss out on meeting their need.
If, however, you listen to understand, you will achieve what’s called “shared meaning”.[8] This happens when you both realize you understand what your spouse said in the way that they intended for you to understand it.
This can be such a difficult thing to accomplish that it’s no wonder it doesn’t happen when you listen to respond! But if you listen to understand, you will be able to enter into their experience empathically and you will create shared meaning.
And when you feel their frustration, their joy, their sorrow as they do, you discover something beautiful. Each other. Through this shared meaning, you see your loved one and know them intimately, and your spouse knows this is happening.
3. Pay Attention
Time is precious. In a world that demands your attention, the focus that you place on your spouse is invaluable. Don’t let yourself be distracted by the news, the notifications on your phone, or your Facebook feed. Look at them when they are sharing with you.
What do they look like? Are they relaxed or agitated? Are they maintaining eye contact or looking away frequently? Is their posture open and aimed in your direction or closed and aimed away?
As you listen, pay attention to the visual cues and clues that they are showing you. Body language is another source of information to discover more about your spouse. It will help paint a more complete picture of what your spouse is feeling.
Not only will this allow you to learn more, but it will signal to your spouse the value you are placing on your relationship. There are few things more intimate than having your loved one’s focused, undivided attention when you are sharing something meaningful.
To empathize with one another, you also need to pay attention to help you understand.
Empathy and Intimacy
The reason showing empathy is critical to achieving intimacy is that it is all about understanding what makes your spouse tick. When they are talking, what are they saying? How can you use this chance to be a partner who will know them inside and out?
Empathy gives you a chance to walk in their shoes despite never having experienced precisely what they have. It bridges the gap between your differences. You can live through each other’s fears, strengths, needs, and desires.
Through empathy, you can feel understood and validated. And you will experience an ever-growing, ever-deepening intimacy as you build your relationship with care, respect, and compassion.
References
[1] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[2] Vernon, G., & Stewart, R. (1957). “Empathy as a Process in the Dating Situation.” American Sociological Review, 22(1), 48-52. Retrieved from Http://Www.Jstor.Org/Stable/2088764.
[3] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[4] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[5] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[6] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[7] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
[8] Edgar C. J. Long, Angera, J., Carter, S., Nakamoto, M., & Kalso, M. (1999). “Understanding the One You Love: A Longitudinal Assessment of an Empathy Training Program for Couples in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, 48(3), 235-242. Doi:10.2307/585632.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:35 — 24.7MB)