Relationship experts have dished out the same advice for years: If you've got a problem, talk it over. But silence, it turns out, has been vastly underrated.

New research suggests that couples with excellent communication skills are not necessarily happier than couples with poor skills. In fact, skilled communicators are more likely to worsen an unhappy marriage, the study of 60 couples found.

"You don't want to be married to a skilled communicator if things aren't going well," says Brant Burleson, a professor at Purdue University. "They know just where to stick the knife -- and how to twist it to cause maximum pain."

Burleson and Dr. Wayne Denton, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest University, also found that in both "happy" and "distressed" couples, the husbands' communication skills -- good or bad -- didn't seem to affect couples' happiness as much as the wives' skills.

"The clinical implication here is that communication-skills training is not the panacea it's been made out to be," Burleson says.

Pub Date: 03/21/99