It's the second week of September and there's a stack on the kitchen counter. Emergency contact forms, the soccer registration that closed yesterday, a permission slip for a field trip nobody mentioned until the night before. You know the pile is there. Your partner has walked past it four times.

You have probably heard someone say "just listen to each other" as if that fixes anything. The problem is most of us think we are listening when we are actually waiting to respond, formulating our rebuttal, or managing our own emotional reaction while our partner is still mid-sentence.