In his hit single “Heartbreak Warfare,” the first single from his Battle Studies album, a song and album about which I have much more to say in the context of my personal life, if anyone would want to hear it, singer-songwriter John Mayer bemoans the lack of communication shared by his partner in their dysfunctional relationship. “If you want more love, why don’t you say so? If you want more love, why don’t you say so? Why don’t you say so?” he sings over and over again, to no avail. While I must admit I do not find Mr. Mayer necessarily the most sympathetic of people, I do share this particular sentiment strongly. Over and over again in life I find myself dealing with people who seem to expect certain mindreading abilities on my part, abilities I do not in any way shape or form possess. As intuitive a person as I tend to be when dealing with a larger body of work like a song, a book, or a movie, when it comes to dealing with short e-mails or phone calls or snippets of conversation which consist of only a few sentences, I lack the context to understand exactly how something should be read, and find that enough information is missing that no matter how my mind fusses with the isolated data points over and over again [1], there are too many possible interpretations to have any confidence that one can find the right answer for the questions one has.
Under ordinary circumstances, I do not consider myself a difficult person to talk to. Since childhood, though, I have had the tendency to wish to make explicit areas of concern, to lay them out on paper (or its digital equivalent), and to think of ways to address those concerns. These qualities have not always endeared me to other people, not least because I tended to construct covenants addressing concerns that other people could not hope to obey because they did not have the heart within them to treat me with the respect and honor that I sought, and they resented being found as violators of a covenant, with all of the wrongdoing that is implied by such a characterization. Sadly, they did not read the placement of such terms in a covenant as being signs of their being important to me, even if difficult to obey, and as an indication that attention was needed to such matters because I cared enough about them to write them down in the first place and to put them in a place where they could be read by others and read later on and reflected upon. Surely, as much as I write for my own sanity, I do not write only for myself and for the moment, but for other people as well, and for the future. At times, I even write to encourage a change of behavior in myself or others, a process that is particularly difficult to achieve whether we wish to change ourselves, those within our areas of concern or influence, or even the much wider world that is almost entirely ignorant and uncaring of who we are.
What is the goal of our communication? Often I ask this of myself and of others. As someone who talks a lot, listens a lot, writes a lot, and reads a lot, I tend to sift through a lot of information. I both read a lot of reports and write a lot of them at work, and even at home I make and update reports of a certain kind for my own purposes. Some communication is meant to inform, to provide information. Most of what I see, though, has a larger purpose than mere intellectual vanity, but rather is information given with an implied (or explicit) desire to encourage or discourage a given action. People who spend time, often hours and hours, fussing over a message to refine it and transit it, do so for very clear purposes. This is especially so if there is little or no financial incentive to do so, because what one has financial incentive to report on or communicate often has a clear monetary motive involved, and such motives are generally straightforward to interpret. Where there is no monetary reward, though, it is often worth wondering what exactly drives someone to communicate and what benefit they expect from it. To be sure, there is peace of mind in speaking what one is thinking or feeling, but if one is communicating to others (either actually or potentially) then there must be some other aim in mind, and that aim is not always easy to discover.
Let us return to the song that began this entry, so that we are not lost in airy generalities that lose touch of practical realities. John Mayer sang a hit song about a dysfunctional relationship that involved fighting and yelling, problem drinking, taking sleeping pills, and mentioning the name of another potential lover as a way of inciting jealousy, all with the implied desire for more love. To be sure, these are not very effective ways of being loved, but that does not stop people from trying them over and over again. John Mayer correctly thought that the angry partner wanted more love, but seemed at a loss as to how to love her in such a way as would make her happy. Implied in his own heartbreak (and his recognition of his partner’s suffering) is a longing not only to receive love, but to give it as well, and give it in such a way that it has its desired result, to make those around us happier and to make our relationships better. We do not want to know only that someone wants more love from us (although we do want to know where we are falling short in caring for others), but also we want to know how it is that we can bridge the gulf between two souls so that we can be at one as we wish. Life is terribly lonely, and relationships are hard to build, so we do not wish to throw them away for nothing if they can possibly be saved, even if situations are not ideal.
What is the context and what are the conditions that we need to build so that others are able to speak their thoughts and feelings, their hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns, in such a way that it is possible to do something about them? When people are worked up, it is hard to be calm and restrained enough so that the desired message can be heard through the emotion. At the other extreme, some people are so restrained that it may be impossible for others to recognize just how deeply they feel about certain matters because their depth of feeling cannot be seen underneath the placid surface. Sometimes we may be unable to convey what it is that we actually want, and sometimes it may be painfully clear what it is that we want but there may be no good way of getting what we want. At other times, we may want a variety of things, some of which are reasonable and some of which cannot be achieved, and the totality of what we want may not be fully known by others, or at least sufficiently known for them to understand the complexities of what we are after in life. After all, we want to understand the people we care about, that we spend time with, that we think about often, and we wish for them to understand us. That which we all most want in life, honor, respect, appreciation, fellowship, belonging, all involve great amounts of communication to build and maintain. Without this communication, all we have are the voices in our own heads, and those all too easily deceive us in all directions.
Yet as much as we may polish the messages we send, seeking to convey a particular point, we have to remember that is only half of the battle. Not only are we senders of messages, but we are receivers of messages as well. And not only do we have a particular context that we communicate within, but so do the people we communicate with. For example, I may write this entry being inspired by continual frustrations in life, particular people with whom my interactions are particularly unsatisfactory, a lifetime of difficulty in conveying my own thoughts and feelings in a way that leads to desired results, and even a day that was dramatically shaped by the problem of people not conveying to me effectively the information that they wanted, or me conveying to them that I had provided the information that they wanted in a form they were able to understand and pass along to others, but not all of these conscious contexts are likely to be understood by an audience. Indeed, some of those contexts are likely to be more obvious to different audiences, each of whom is likely to exaggerate the importance of the context they care about or notice the most strongly themselves. Additionally, there may be additional contexts that a given person will notice that will be valid and applicable contexts that I did not have in mind when writing (for as deeply layered a person as I am by intention, I am still more so by accident).
Even more to the point, no matter how diligently or well we may seek to convey a particular message to achieve a particular result, there are many possibilities for how that result will be interpreted and responded to. People may hear our message imperfectly, but because their heart is right with ours, we may have the desired result we seek. People may hear our imperfect and blundering communications and act in ways that we view as hostile or undesirable, even if they would have responded favorably had they understood what we sought to communicate. Others will understand our communication perfectly and simply not care to respond as we would like, even knowing exactly what we want. Still others will not get our message at all, no matter how we may try to send it. The fact that we cannot achieve perfection, and the fact that the results of our communication may in no way match our intentions, or even what we may want or deserve, does not in any way absolve us from the responsibility of doing the best we can. And so we send messages out into the ether, or toss a message in a bottle and throw it into the ocean, and hope for a favorable reply from those we send our messages to. And so does everybody else.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/maybe-im-reading-too-much-into-this/
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