Close Relationships: Poor Communication

Just because you know someone very well like your mother, father, sister, husband, children, or best friends doesn’t mean you always understand what they mean one hundred percent of the time. We tend to miscommunicate with the people we are closest to every now and then. In the article, “Close Relationships Sometimes Mask Poor Communication,” couples tend to believe that they can communicate better than strangers, but a new study suggests that these couples communicate no better than strangers do. Closeness communication bias makes us believe that we communicate better than strangers so an experiment was conducted with twenty-four couples to prove that we miscommunicate with our loved ones more often than we think (2011).
In this experiment, the couples were sat back to back and each of them took turns saying phrases like, “It’s hot in here,” and the other had to state what they thought their spouse meant. The couples thought that they communicated better, but turns out that they didn’t know exactly what their spouse meant. This experiment reminds me of the way that my younger sister and I communicate. We are only one year apart so we have spent thirty-four years together. Since she has been

3). To be effective communicators, my sister and I had to achieve “shared meaning” with one another. It would’ve been better for my sister to ask me what I meant instead of assuming what I meant to make sure that this type of miscommunication does not happen in the future. Since then, we have talked more over the phone or in person because text messages and words on social media are taken out of context all of the time. I’ve seen so many family and friends fall out based on what was said on Facebook. We may not always see eye to eye but we can agree to disagree without getting