Friendship Factor by Alan Loy Mcginnis

Author:Alan Loy Mcginnis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Fortress Press

CHAPTER 9

A Coffee-Cup Concept of Marriage

We discovered a terrific four-letter word for psychotherapy: talk.

—Penni and Richard Crenna

Dear Ann Landers:

My husband doesn’t talk to me. He just sits there night after night, reading the newspaper or looking at TV. When I ask him a question, he grunts ’hu, ’unhu, or uh’huh. Sometimes he doesn’t even grunt. All he really needs is a housekeeper and somebody to sleep with him when he feels like it. He can buy both. There are times when I wonder why he got married.

SUCH COMPLAINTS ARE NOT UNCOMMON. FOR reasons that are not altogether clear, many of us have a tendency to stop talking to those we love the longer we have known them.

Some time ago a psychologist ran an experiment measuring the amount of conversation that occurs between the average wife and husband in a week’s time. To make the experiment accurate, the researcher strapped portable electronic microphones to the subjects and measured every word they uttered—idle conversation while driving to the store, requests to pass the toast, everything.

There are 168 hours in a week, 10,080 minutes. How much of that time do you suppose the average couple devoted to talking to each other? No, not ten hours, not a single hour, nor even thirty minutes. The conversation took, on the average, a grand total of seventeen minutes. “Loneliness,” says Germaine Greer, “is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.”

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