Enhancing verbal intimacy skills?

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I heard the phrase 'verbal intimacy' brought up again recently and I decided to have a look at it - as I know the importance, heck, half the time when I am sending questions on Eharmony I'll send the "Assess your verbal intimacy skills" just because, I want to be with a good communicator.

The only thing that I start to wonder about more though - it seems like there's at least three prongs to this. One is being open. Am I pretty open to talking about my own needs? Yes. Good conflict resolver? That too. Timing, knowing what to say when? I'm not terrible - I can sense a mood and keep myself on track with it. When I got to this part I had to laugh - it was indicated that, for what a lot of guys go through in terms of society's pressures, that we often disengage ourselves from our emotions and because of this we end up having no clue what we're feeling anymore. How am I on this one? I'd say there are a few times where what I'm feeling is quite unambiguous whether its tired, motivated, excited, anxious, pensive, etc. but there really are plenty of times in between where really, if someone asked me "What are you feeling right now?"... there's a good chance I'd go synesthete and start pulling names from Sherwin Williams color cards...."Ummm....chartreuse?". Its just that, a lot of times, it can be vague and murky, it often won't feel like its either here or there fully.

Being that this term has so many fronts and so many angles I did want to bring this up. Particularly for the women here I'd ask the question: what's generally expected of guys on this level? Beyond that, when you see friends of yours that are in happy/strong/solid long term relationships vs. those who are having challenges, what kinds of qualitative differences do you see in their verbal intimacy skills? What do you hear about in terms of raves or complaints?

Quite honestly, I have no idea and, if you have the first few prongs mastered, then you are way ahead of me. Do you have any trusted NT female friends you could ask?

Unfortunately while I do have NT female friends I don't think they'd be the best go-to's. I have chronically single friends at one end and friends who are highly attractive but suspect regarding these skills at the other.

That makes me think, having something like an "Ask a Super NT" thread might be a neat addition, and I'm sure someone knows either a guy or girl in their life who's very much in the flow of things but also happens to be 1) very self-aware, 2) altruistic, and 3) highly judgmental. I tend to think that people like this have a shade of AS in them anyway so who better to depict and explain the topography of a foreign continent than a local who already speaks our language.

That might be better than a 'blind-leading-the-blind' type of approach, lol. Maybe Alex would be able to find us a resident NT or relationships columnist.

That would be a plan, though the only thing I worry about with specialists is they tend to fear the weight of their own words so much that they can easily stop short of saying anything meaningful. They'd have to be willing to tell it to us straight and give us information while writing all the caveats in that their entertaining - ie. that no advice is truly one size fits all, what's true for one person won't always be true for the next, etc. etc.

I don't expect a ton, but I don't express myself to well verbally (I mean out loud, not in written form). I don't care if my SO expresses himself in an email, letter, phone call, expressive dance, whatever. The biggest problem I see in my friend's relationships is 1. they don't know how to express what they want to say in a way they think won't hurt the other person's feelings (i.e., my friend wanted her bf to lose weight and didn't know how to say that), or 2. they are unwilling to talk to their SO. I don't really hear complaints from them, they just sometimes come to me asking how they should tell their bf/gf something or asking "what does he mean by that?" Things like that.