Can you also understand each other without a word if you love each other? It is like the lucky numbers on TV: always without guarantee! I was in love for the first time in my life and now I shook hands with my new friend's grandmother for the first time. "Young man," she said, "I was married to my husband for almost 50 years, and he never told me he loved me." Grandma's intimate instant confession made me grin embarrassed. "But I always knew it!" She added with a smile. My 17 year old head started to rotate. I better never "I love you!" say? Had I just learned the secret of undying love?
Relationship needs good communication
Hardly likely. My great love lasted only a few months. And even old ladies cannot know the final love formula, I now know – because they simply don't exist.
What we do know, however, is that relationships need a lot of good communication. Whereby "communicate" does not automatically mean "speak". About 80 percent of interpersonal communication happens through body language. "We understand each other without words" is somehow always true. Couples communicate through tenderness, attention, care, gifts big and small, caring, spending time together, and sexuality. This is how they strengthen their loving togetherness.
But praise, compliments and expressions of love then need already spoken words. And people who understand the world through their sense of hearing need more love vows breathed in their ears than flowers. The flowers are more important for visual people. And the kinaesthetic feeling type is the most affectionate. Of course, there is never anything to be said against communicating on all sensory channels.
Security through wordless understanding
After some time as lovers, we understand a lot of what is going on in the other without him having to tell us. We can be so attuned to one another that we only have to look at one another to immediately leave a restaurant or buy a bed together. The wordless understanding conveys security. But it also has its pitfalls. Because if we think we understand each other blindly, we don't look closely anymore. Then we hold onto old pictures of the other and don't notice his or her change.
Oskar Holzberg, 66, has been advising couples in his Hamburg practice for more than 20 years and is always asked relationship questions. His current book is called: "New key phrases of love" (242 p., 20 euros, Dumont).
Our understanding of each other can be deep, but still superficial. Because there is a difference between emotions and feelings. We can see emotions on the face and body language. We see whether the loved one is sad, happy, thoughtful or fearful. But what exactly moves her, her feelings – she has to tell us. Only then can we understand that our comment about her sister has made her feel old about competition and is therefore annoying.
Wordless communication is wonderful in good weather. Regardless of whether we understand our partner correctly, we will interpret him benevolently. But in the low pressure area we have to talk to each other in order not only to assume negative intentions. Because to really understand each other, love also needs words.
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