We all know that Miss Ann Thrope is the Love Doctor Of Teh Interwebs, and there was one thing in her Love Post™ that was undoubtedly unintentionally absent… ill communication.

I, for one, am a very poor verbal communicator.  I have a hard time expressing myself verbally and even when I try, it always seems to come out wrong.  I’ve had this problem for a LONG time.  Which is one of the main reasons I took up writing the way I have.  It just seems to me that I am able to express my thoughts, but most importantly my emotions, more clearly on a written page.  I have often communicated to my girlfriends through the written word, and although I did learn the nasty lesson that not all words are read the same way that they are written, for the most part I had some large successes with it.

One of the things I used to do was a journal of letters.  While my fetish for blank journal books is well documented by my drawer full of them, there is only one of these journals that I have kept through the years.  It is the one I shared with Pudding when we were dating.  The first letter entry was dated September 14, 1999.  Our relationship was young… but we were having problems already for a variety of reasons.  These were problems we could not talk out as hard as we tried… so we wrote them out as best we could as we also wrote out our love and adoration of one another.  It wasn’t all good though.  Life rarely is all peached with cream, and the book is a clear reflection of that with the last entry dated January 7, 2001 in what has become known as Puddings Concession of Defeat that she wrote from a hospital bed.  Needless to say, reading it I finally understood where she was coming from and found the words to tell her what she really meant to me… so there was a lot more of life after that entry.

We found in writing to each other another way to communicate.  Perhaps it was not a better way, but it was ANOTHER way.  I think its important to realize when there is ill communication between two people, to try and communicate in a different way.  These were my words last night to three different friends (two of whom are in a relationship with each other) and the common question was, how?

Since I am not Miss Ann Thrope, Love Doctor Of Teh Interwebs I am turning to you for a bit of help.  How else would you communicate with your partner when the methods you are using aren’t working?