In early 1988, the obscure UK pop duo Scarlett & Black had their only charting hit in the emotional “You Don’t Know.” The group, a male-female duo who had both been in prior bands before working together, only released one album which charted in the lower half of the Billboard 200 albums chart before the duo were released from their record contract, broke up, and found other ways to stay in the music business in other acts as well as in songwriting. The song itself is a heartfelt rebuke to an insensitive lover whose lack of empathy and understanding makes it impossible for the narrator’s emotions to be understood when they are begging for love, attention, or whatever other needs are not being filled within the relationship. As is the case with one perceptive Australian music blogger [1], it is a mystery to me why the song was only marginally successful in the United States and did not break through anywhere else. It was a song of its time, and a beautiful song at that, one whose message is easy to understand and performed well. As it happens, this song was on the charts this week in 1988 on its way to its #20 peak on the Billboard Hot 100, and I was listening to it on the way to dinner.

Earlier this afternoon, as I write this, I was eating lunch and reading a book while also talking with a dear friend of mine seeking to help her process a frustrating conversation she had recently had with a friend of hers. This friend is, unfortunately, a somewhat manic person who does not like to let anyone else contribute and has some marked antisocial tendencies. As might be readily imagined, she blames the lack of love and care she received from her mother for the problems that she suffers, and for her inability to recognize or care about the feelings of those around her. In general, and properly, people tend to be far less concerned about the etiology of one’s sociopathic tendencies that lead one to behave selfishly and with an absence of reciprocity and far more concerned about how someone plans on curbing such unacceptable tendencies. It is far more useful to develop better approaches to life and overcome one’s negative proclivities than to seek to affix blame for those tendencies on others. Ultimately, people care about how you behave, and are not interested in playing blame games to avoid responsibility for one’s behavior, a lesson some people have a hard time learning and applying .

Nevertheless, it is not always meant as a rebuke to tell someone that they do not understand our feelings. Sometimes people do not understand our emotional state and our feelings because we do not let them. This can be both intentional and unintentional. I find, speaking for myself, that my pervasive and consistent difficulties in verbalizing to others what I feel is a rather overdetermined problem, as such issues usually are. Personality theory, of the Myers Briggs variety, states that Extroverted Feeling is the 8th most developed aspect of my personality, out of 8 different possibilities (Extroverted Thinking is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top one). A lifetime spent in the company of those who I did not trust with my feelings, and who often sought to use their supposed knowledge about me to take advantage of weakness or to ridicule what they saw as unusual ways and the extensive effort of cultivating a polite reserve have not helped matters. Only those who are kind enough not to be viewed as threatening and sufficiently emotionally intuitive to recognize my generally indirect ways will be privy to a great deal of my emotional life, or those who are sensitive readers of what I write listeners to the lyrics of the songs I am drawn to listen to and sing. In such cases I do not blame others for not understanding–I do not wish them to understand, in general.

Even so, mankind was created and meant to live in love and in harmony with others. Part of that requires, on at least some level, for there to be mutual emotional communication so that we can both understand others and be understood. It is deeply unfortunate for people to live isolated from others. Most of us (myself included) seek the company of others whom we can trust, and with whom we can be ourselves, whose problems and concerns we listen to and take seriously and who take our own feelings into consideration and treat them with care and respect. It is only in such a way that we can live as we ought to live. To treat others without love and respect is to deny them the necessary emotional food that makes us human. Even the animals around us need our love to live as they ought to. We were put on this earth not to cry out in frustration and isolation at a cruel and selfish world, but to exist in networks full of mutual love, respect, and concern. How common is it to live as we ought?

[1] http://rqsretrouniverse.blogspot.com/2008/05/scarlett-black-just-miss-gold.html