Tag: Dr. John Gottman

There is a joke about a husband who is a computer programmer. His wife asks him to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. She says: "Please go the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread, and, if they have eggs, get six."

The husband returns with six loaves of bread. The wife asks why he bought six loaves of bread. He says, "Because they had eggs."

The lesson in this joke is that both expressing and reading, or "de-coding," information needs to include the nonverbal as well as the verbal content of the message.