One of the most repeated news lately in the "media" is that of marital breakups. I will limit myself to the last one I have just heard about. On the front page of a newspaper you can read the following headline: "Every day a average of four marriages break up in Navarra". (Diario de Navarra, 25-9-2018).

This current "epidemic" has very well studied causes. In young married couples, the main cause is their immaturity for married life; they marry with a bachelor mentality, without being aware that they owe each other, that marriage entails committed love, life in common and sacrifice.

In married couples who have been living together for more than twenty years, the main causes are the following: routine in married life, lack of communication, loss of the ability to "hold on" and infidelity. In addition, the unfaithful spouse often trivializes this injustice that goes against the essence of marriage: "that little girl means nothing to me; it is you that I really love".

For reasons of space, I will refer to only one cause of marital breakups: lack of communication.

One of the greatest current obstacles to marital communication is the addiction of one or both spouses to the Internet, even in the time reserved for conversation at the end of each workshop. Sacrificing time of conjugal intimacy to be an Internet user is a foolishness that usually happens invoice (both in a business of social networks, as well as in marriage). I suspect that those who do so have not read André Maurois, for whom "a happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short".

To communicate is to make one's own things common, to share. How does this happen in conjugal life? What are its possibilities?

"Interpersonal communication, in the context of marriage, is a condition which, because it is essential, is unavoidable and indispensable. Married life is communication. The love that unites two people is dialogue. When this dialogue is stifled, hindered or disappears, it dies. Through the meeting and the interpersonal dialogue, an "I" opens its interiority, freely, and transfers it to the intimacy of a "you", by whose virtue they end up constituting a "we". (A. Polaino-Lorente: Communication in the couple. Most frequent psychological errors. 2002).

Psychologist Alex Bayorti also stresses the importance of communication in marriage, but with another argument: what usually happens when it is deficient: "Among the many reasons for the current increase in marital breakups, there is one that is transversal and consists of accumulating negative emotions with respect to the other. This sort of pressure cooker becomes a real problem that any spark can ignite. It is common that we have been taught to tolerate more than to communicate. The result is that the part that wants to talk and communicate is repressed and that the part that prefers not to talk about things is in a constant state of immobility".

In this status each party usually keeps a list of grievances in silence, which at any time can emerge in the form of mutual reproaches, which can be the trigger for a breakup announced.

Good marital communication is more affective than cognitive. Not being aware of this, many married couples undervalue the expression of feelings and in conflicts appeal only to reasons. Thus, the more sensitive spouse may say to the more rational one: "Give me affection and no more arguments". The poet Miguel D. Ors put it this way:

"Beneath the snowfall/Summer is being born/Wait. Give me your hand/and don't ask me anything."

Emotional communication usually improves significantly when both spouses learn to make intelligent and positive use of their emotions. This involves developing goal-oriented emotional competencies. One of these is self-control of negative emotions (irritability, anger, resentment, etc.); another is empathic understanding. The latter consists of knowing how to grasp the feelings of another person and to tune in to them, so as to be able to help them. People with little empathy suffer from "emotional deafness"; they are unable to detect the mood of others.

Another valuable emotional skill is to know how to adapt to the other spouse's way of being, to his or her differences and flaws. There are men who "forget" that they are married to a woman; and women who "forget" that they are married to a man.

I suggest men to be more attentive to their wives' complaints. For example "I am a married woman, but I don't have a husband; you married your work". And I suggest women to be more explicit when they feel upset; not to swallow their anger; not to demand their husband to be a fortune teller.