We’ve often dreamed of being able to say something like this to a group of couples who have come to one of our marriage seminars. We don’t know of another quality that can do more for a marriage than empathy – that capacity to put yourself in your partner’s shoes and see the world from his or her perspective; to imagine what life must be like to be lived in his or her skin. It’s what poet Walt Whitman was getting at back in 1855 when he wrote his master work, Leaves of Grass: “I do not ask how the wounded one feels; I myself, become the wounded one.”