My Old Dutch...

"We've been together now for forty years
and it don't seem a day too much

Oh there ain't a lady livin' in the land
wot's the like of me dear old Dutch..."

If you are ancient enough, you may remember Hermans Hermits - or even Albert Chevalier - singing this song of long-term marital contentment. Perhaps you also remember Peter Sellers' version which starts in the same vein but ends in him trading bi-lingual insults with his "silly old Dutch person" (her side of the argument sounding rather more like Italian, so it was probably Sophia Loren).

There is a serious point to this, however unintentional: as couples, we can be "together" for years and years and still find that, at times, we are speaking a mutually unintelligible language. 

"You said 'x', but when I did 'x' you got mad at me! You are always doing that..." 

"I never said 'x', I said 'y'. You only thought I said 'x' because that's what you always think / do / your mother warned me / my mother warned me / ..."

And so on.

The good news is that this is both perfectly normal, and completely explicable. No character flaw is involved on either side - just some fundamental (and unchangeable) differences of perception. While we can't change the way we are wired, we can learn to understand each other's perceptions and therefore make allowances and adjustments when we communicate and work through daily life together.

And that is where Birkman® Express is so invaluable. It gives you both objective data on what can otherwise seem very subjective and hard to pin down differences. In the next few posts, I'll talk about some specifics, but you can learn an awful lot just by sitting down with each other's reports in front of you, and talk through what you can see the differences might mean...