Yakety-Yak: Patience, Timing and Clarity

It happened again the other night.  The house was quiet.  Husband was outside having a smoke and I finished up some work, packed up the computer and settled deep into a book.  Ten minutes later, I look up and realize that my husband has come in and started "a conversation".   He's got no idea I'm not listening and honestly when I figure out that he's talking about the difference between Irving and Updike,  I'm envisioning bloody self-mutilation as the only viable way out.  That's how painfully frustrating "instant" conversation is to me when I'm not in the right state of mind or in the middle of something else. 

For him, it's a bit different.  Here is an example. 

ME: We need to think about our summer road trip....I was thinking either Novia Scotia or Montana/Wyoming...what do you think?

HIM: Novia Scotia sounds good.

ME: Great.

And 2 weeks later, I'll come back with tickets, rental car, two weeks of driving maps and all hotel reservations all in a labled 3-ring binder complete with all possible activities we could do on any given day. I'm all puffed up and excited and he'll look at me and ask, "When did we decide this?" 

See...to me, when he says, "Nova Scotia sounds good" I hear him making a decision. But in his mind he is saying, "It sounds good to me, but let's think about it for a while and then we'll get back together and we will discuss it again and decide together."    

As you can imagine, either one of these scenarios is not in any way satisfying for either of us.

Ironically, our communication mayhem stems directly from one of the things that drew us together in the first place--we are absolute polar opposites. There are a million examples of how opposite we are, but I'll stick with the pertinent one: To him, any discussion and/or decision is a thoughtful, circular, integrated process. To me, most are a fast, linear means to an end.

In the beginning, we defined it differently: I described it as "he calms me". He talked about "liking my energy". Yeah, the first blush of love might have distracted us a bit from what we were really trying to say.

I thought he calmed me? Well, looking back, it might have been a slight coma induced by a 77 minute treatise on Sun-Ra's "Seven Minutes of Silence". (huh, irony.) And it's not just me. When he and our son came back from the park and the first "bird and bees" conversation, I completely understood our son's glazed over eyes and comment about the "forty-five years of talking" that went on during that thirty minute session.

My "energy"? He was probably stunned in submission by the sheer volume--as well as the sheer volume of actionable items that came out of any conversation--most of which were rediculous in nature.

Fifteen years on and we've gotten comfortable with the issues these differences bring.  And we've gotten comfortable with the fact that every 5 years or so we find ourselves sitting down with a communications counselor so we can remind ourselves of the little tips and tools we need so that our conversations don't turn into the Cold War.     

And so we find ourselves in one of those cycles now, sitting together in a room with another person, trying to get back into the groove of good conversations. It's good and fun...we laugh a lot which is great.  And it is a nice feeling knowing that even in the tensest of moments, we know we are both working on something that matters.

This time I decided to write down the three key things I need to remember as a bit of a cheat sheet for me/us, in the hopes that a reminder will lengthen the cycle just a bit: 

MY PATIENCE:  I know how he likes to and needs to think through things--and the inherent benefits of this process.  When I ignore this and take his first response as his answer it's because I'm either being lazy or taking the easy way out. Busted!

HIS TIMING:  He knows that he can't spring a conversation on me if I'm in the middle of something else.Typically it works better if we engage in the long discussions when we are cooking, driving, planting---I can keep busy with my hands while giving him my full attention--and even then, we keep it to 30 minutes increments so he gets to the point and I don't wander off.

OUR CLARITY:  For any conversation, it helps if we establish up front if we want each other to:

A)  Just Listen
B)  Listen and provide totally biased feedback and comfort
C)  Listen and give unbiased, unvarnished feedback (he tends to go straight to this one so I need to really be clear about whether I want number 2 or 3, or it can be dangerous for him)
D)  Listen and then do something to help fix the situation

I know that there is no rocket science here, just plain old common sense tools for each of us to apply.  Which doesn't mean that these tips are any easier to remember when he's blocking my view of Mark Harmon on NCIS and wanting to talk about the meaning of Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore".  I mean, really.