Gender schmender. If you want a communication dilemma of worldly proportion, try merging a passive aggressive and an expressive Latin.
My parents taught me a multitude of valuable lessons, lessons so great they each deserve a multiple-page blog post, but there are a few things I've had to learn on my own. I had to learn how to fight.
I’m not talking about the kind of fighting you do when you’re on a soap box. My parents certainly encouraged my protagonist, but they never taught me how to fight with someone I love, to deal with interpersonal conflict.
My parents—I never saw them fight. I never saw them argue and I certainly never heard them yell or scream at each other. I thought it was normal married life, and when I married my expectation was that my husband and I would never fight.
Stop laughing. How was I supposed to know? It’s not like there was an interpersonal communications class in high school. Apparently our public-school educators think chemistry and algebra are more important than certain life skills.
It took me a long time to realize my parents do fight they just do it in this weird, passive aggressive way. Even today when there's conflict in the family, we don't talk about it. We just pout or pretend it doesn't exist. If you bring up something controversial, they’ll ignore you or get mad and pretend to be happy. It's how my parents were raised, and it's how they raised their three children. We are what we learn.
As a kid it was a wonderfully peaceful existence, but I’ve come to realize it created a whole host of unrealistic expectations.
My first husband—completely the opposite of my parents. With him I learned that trying to resolve conflict lead to yelling, screaming, finger pointing, and sometimes punching, but he’s dead so let’s leave it at that. What I learned, though, was to add ducking and running to my communications tool belt.
My second husband (no,
there’s not a third), he's also the polar opposite of my family. First of all
he's Latin. He's loud. When he feels something, he feels it passionately. He
expresses it passionately. I never have to wonder what's going on inside this
man's head. When he's upset, he tells you. He tells Wolf Blitzer, Bill O’Reilly
and the financial commentators on MSNBC. Apparently it doesn’t matter that they can’t hear him through the TV.
When it’s personal, he expects to talk about it, and he expects to resolve it. How the hell does that work? In the beginning of our relationship one of us would get angry and my first instinct was to shut down, to swallow it whole and hope I didn't choke. I’d put on my happy face, seethe inside and stop talking. My second instinct was to duck and run.
We were in a foreign country walking back to our hotel after dinner when he turned to me and said, "Tricia if you can't learn how to talk, we don't have a future."
“Learn how to talk,” I thought. “Are you crazy? We just spent six months in a long distance relationship and all we did was talk. I have phone bills to prove it. I just followed you across the ocean. We talked about it. I’ve told you more about me than is allowed by the girl-friend code-of-ethics. Did we do that through smoke signals? Learn how to talk? Most men complain women talk too much, and here you are complaining that I don’t talk enough. How much wine did you have with that pasta?”
He put on his wiser, older-man-attitude and explained in an unwise, I’m right, you’re wrong little snipped that getting me to open up about controversy of the interpersonal kind was like pulling teeth from a chicken. I needed to learn how to handle conflict between the two of us and to do it in a rational, healthy and meaningful way. Huh? You’ve met my family, right?
So, here’s what I did. I went and earned a degree in Communications. Now this is not just any college major mind you, this is a B.S. degree. Put your boots on people, the mud does get deep. I studied all sorts of communication: corporate, marketing, journalism, not-for-profit, public relations. Hell, I studied so many theories I was surly a master, and to round it out, I added studies in sociology, psychology and anthropology. If we are what we learn, I was going to learn something different.
It’s been well over a decade since we had that little chat on the streets of Norway, and my husband and I tend to communicate each other to death. In fact he often wishes I’d just stop talking. His progressively worsening sense of hearing, I’m quite positive it’s self inflicted and wishful thinking.
Now that I’ve spent years and years studying communication, working in the field of communications and slowly communicating my husband into a state of deafness, I still have a significant stumbling block in my life that I can’t communicate my way over.
You see, I’ve become the child and sibling always trying to engage the conflict. I’m the one saying things like, “Let’s take a closer look at this.” I blurt things like, “Can’t we just put this on the table and talk about it?”
Hello, I know you can see all those elephants. They’re not going anywhere unless we talk about them. Let’s discuss the positives, negatives, impacts, varied consequences, alternatives and the results. Come on people, let’s talk. Wanna chat? Can we have a family meeting? Do you have a few minutes to discuss X, Y and Z?
In response, my parents and my brother have developed two diversionary tactics. When they see me coming, they put on their happy face, shut down, swallow it whole and hope not to choke, or they duck and run.
When they know my husband and I are both coming to visit, I think they stock the fridge—with extra beer and wine.