Instead of prematurely asking what you should do, try something new. Ask no questions rather than an action question. Try meditating, exercising, sensing your arms and legs, or any of the approaches we have suggested for putting you in touch with your inner creative ability. Then try answering any or all of the following questions:

• What is it I don’t yet understand? This question or ones like it can penetrate the mind for clarity and understanding.

• What is it that I’m really feeling? When there is a problem there are usually emotions - fear, anger, hurt, or sorrow - and this question can help you become aware of seeing them specifically.

• What is it that I’m not seeing? Problems usually come from not seeing clearly. By asking about what you are not seeing specifically, almost as if it consists of material objects, you heighten your perceptual ability.

• What voice is speaking? Is it your Voice of Judgment, your objective intelligence, your voice of childhood emotions or fears, or the voice of your Essence speaking inside of you? You can bet that if you have a problem, the objective intelligence and the Essence are relatively silent. But personifying and identifying the inner voices contributing to a problem sometimes is enough in itself to achieve the clarity needed for action.

This kind of exploratory questioning for clarity doesn’t take long, especially when preceded or followed by meditation.

Radical self-inquiry is the path to seeing habits and patterns. Questions that drive us toward that insight are endlessly helpful:

• ‘What parts of me are being projected onto the other person?’ 

• ‘How do I reclaim those parts of me?’ 

• ‘What do my reactions say about me?’ 

• ‘Why do I do what I do?’ 

• ‘Why do they do what they do?’ 

• ‘What need for love, safety, or belonging might they be trying to meet with their irrational behavior?

Suggestion #3: Radical Curiosity…

It can be a real joy to lose ourselves in the experience of another person. It can also feel strange at first, if you’re not used to it, and it might take some effort. Curiosity—real, deep curiosity about what others are experiencing—goes a long way in important relationships. It opens up avenues of conversation and knowledge that we never knew were there. It helps others feel understood and appreciated. It’s important even in less significant relationships, where it can set a precedent of caring and increase the strength of new, fragile bonds…

The crucial point is that being curious helps us connect to others, and this connection makes us more engaged with life. Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this in turn helps us understand them. This process enlivens everyone involved. The “strangers on a train” experiment points to these cascading benefits, which we’ll discuss much more in Chapter Ten. Even a small interest in another person, a brief word, can create new excitements, new avenues of connection, and new pathways for life to flow.

Like generosity, curiosity is an upward spiral.

We expected that empathic accuracy—getting the right answer about what your partner was feeling—would correlate with a stronger sense of relationship satisfaction. This correlation was certainly there—understanding how your partner is feeling is a good thing.

But more important than that, especially for women, was the empathic effort involved. If a person felt their partner was making a good-faith effort to understand them, they felt more positively about the interaction and about the relationship, regardless of their partner’s accuracy.

To put it simply, understanding another person is great, but just trying to understand goes a long way in building connection.

Some people do this automatically, but efforts to understand others can also be deliberate, intentional behaviors. It needn’t come naturally to you at first, but the more you try, the easier it will get. The next time you have the opportunity, try asking yourself:

How is this person feeling?

What is this person thinking?

Am I missing something here?

How might I feel if I were in this person’s shoes?

And when you can, let them know that you’re curious and trying to understand—a small effort that can have an enormous impact.

First, listen without commenting.

Then, try to communicate what you’ve heard your partner say without judgment (this is the hard part). You might begin with something like: What I’m hearing you say is ___. Is that right?

A second technique that is helpful in its own right and can make reflective listening even more valuable is to offer some understanding of your partner’s reasons for a feeling or behavior. The goal is not to point out your brilliance and ability to see things your partner cannot, but to let your partner know that you see them. You want to communicate that it makes sense that she feels this way or that he is behaving in that way, and to nurture that bedrock of empathy and affection that research has shown to be valuable. For example, you might say, It makes sense that you feel so strongly about this... and then continue with something like: since you care so much about being kind. Or: ... since this was the way you’ve described things happening in your family growing up.

A third useful practice is to try to step back a bit from the conversation, a practice that psychologists call “self-distancing,” and look at your experience as if you are watching someone else. You might notice the thoughts that this person (i.e., you) is having, and recognize them as fleeting thoughts that may shift. This is a technique that shares much in common with mindfulness approaches, and the psychologists Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have done a lot of research showing its utility. Together these practices may help you to get started with challenging conversations and hang in there emotionally when things get tough, to slow down, and to show your partner that you’re trying to understand.