Charles Duhigg

And then she would get upset because I was acting irrationally.

And I'm a professional communicator.

I'm a journalist.

And I couldn't figure out why this kept happening.

And so I went to all these experts and I said, tell me what I'm doing wrong.

And they said, well...

It's this thing called the matching principle.

And to understand how it works, you got to understand, we all think of a discussion as being about one thing, right?

We're talking about my day or where we're going to go on vacation.

But what the research shows us from the last decade is that every discussion is actually made up of different kinds of conversations.

And in particular, there are three big buckets that most of those conversations fall into.

There are practical discussions where we're trying to solve a problem, make plans.

There are emotional conversations where I want to tell you how I feel, but I don't want you to solve that for me.

I want you to empathize.

And then there are social conversations, which is about how do we relate to each other and how do we relate to society?

And they said, the thing is, if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, then you won't really communicate with each other.

You'll fail to hear each other.

And so when you came home, you were having an emotional conversation and your wife responded with a practical conversation.

And both of those are legitimate conversations, but because you were having different conversations at the same moment, you couldn't connect.

You couldn't really hear each other and hear what each other needed.