Baaton Baaton Mein

Common wisdom lays ample stress upon good communication in order for a marriage to be successful.  Yet, whenever I am in the presence of a septuagenarian or octogenarian couple with a long and successful marriage, I am invariably struck by the scarcity of the spoken word between them.  It almost always seems like they are just happy co-existing.  So what is their secret?

The answer lies in their ability to communicate effectively using non-verbal cues.  Pavana always says that I am quite the bumbling idiot when it comes to picking up on non-verbal cues, especially when we have someone over or when there are more people present than just the two of us.  I do not completely disagree with her.  At the same time, I don't think she is particularly adroit at picking up on all of my non-verbal cues either.  And that's okay.  We are merely into the 12th year of our marriage, and we are both evolving as marital communicators and learning as we go.  The learning happens at different rates though, which is why we sometimes have small conflicts.  I leave it up to you to decide who is the faster learner; it should be pretty obvious!

And then there is also the written communication (read texting).  As a young couple in the early days of our courtship, our conversations were embarrassingly frivolous, or at least they seem so now.  Those were the days when cell networks would offer 100 free text messages per day, and I remember we would exhaust our respective quotas every day with the said frivolities.  Today, I can safely say that we have evolved well past that embarrassing stage of our relationship.  Our text message exchanges are still embarrassing, but in a different way.  Sample the screenshots below.  And also know that in most cases, each exchange is the only worthwhile text conversation had in that entire day. 

On fall-time kid hygiene:

On domestic smells:

On furniture rearrangement:

On nocturnal duties:

So irrelevant that I can't even think of a title: