The Medium is the Message; The Content is "Ouch"

[bcholmes]

I'm absolutely dreadful at small talk. Always have been. But I've been thinking a lot about something somone once wrote on alt.poly about what small talk means. The person in question said... hurm... let me find it... ah, yes:

The semantic content is "ping", and the returning semantic content is also "ping."

After I read that, I suddenly understood something about small talk that I'd never understood before.

And I've been thinking about a number of the fights that Borden and I had, and trying to re-read them in light of some new ideas that I've let marinate (<-- goofy Kissing Jessica Stein reference).

baratron and angilong have both pointed out that Borden really seems to need to process her feelings about the break-up. And I think I'm on the verge of understanding something about why Borden is saying the stuff she's saying.

I'm gonna use a concrete example to try to explain what I'm thinking. There was an incident that happened toward the end of our relationship. Borden came to visit me in Toronto in mid-December; she arrived on a Saturday morning, and left on a Tuesday afternoon. Saturday was good, Sunday was pretty prickly, and (contrary to my original plan) I had to work on Monday.

When I got home from work on Monday evening, Borden wanted to go back to a bookstore on Bloor Street to buy a book (she had rejected the idea of buying the book there the previous Saturday on political grounds).

It was kinda drizzly out (we were having an unusually mild December) and we rode the bus even though it wasn't that far away from my place. Borden picked up the book, and then spent a while looking at and talking with the store owner about various tarot decks in the store (it was a newage store). Then we wandered into a German deli across the street (again, a place we'd been in the previous Saturday) to buy some fish-paste and paté.

As we wandered out of the deli, Borden asked me if I had any bread to make toast (on which she could put her fish-paste); I told her that I hadn't seen any bread in the house, but that we almost certainly had some bagels in the freezer. I additionally said that getting bread was easy enough. She asked me what flavour of bagels we had, and I told her that there were almost certainly onion bagels, and that there might be poppy-seed bagels. She thought about this and finally said, "well, onion bagels will be fine."

I discovered later that what she meant was "I really don't feel up to shopping for bread, and I'm content to have onion bagels". What I assumed she was saying was, "Oh, don't go out of your way for me; I'll settle for the onion bagels." To which I responded, "oh, it's no problem; there are a coupl'a places where we can buy bread on the way home."

We walked along Bloor and I took us into a bakery; it was nearing the end of the day, and the selection of breads was meager. I asked Borden if any of the bread appealed to her, and she shook her head.

When we reached the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, I turned north toward the subway station. Borden called after me: "BC, where are you going?"

"To the subway," I replied. And what I thought was, I'm not up for walking all the way home in this rain.

Bathurst subway station has a bakery in it. I went in and noticed that they had a better selection of bread than the previous bakery. I turned to Borden and asked, "Do any of these breads work for you?"

And she snapped at me. She said, "I don't want any of these breads. I want to go. I just want to get back. There's a particular kind of bread that I get in Minneapolis."

What I felt was confusion. Disorientation. And a bit of resentment. I thought, Wait a minute. Everything about this evening is stuff that I thought you wanted. What's with the hostility? But I didn't say anything in response. I lead us down to the subway platform, and we waited for the subway.

I started replaying the evening's events in my mind. Was there some clue or sign that I hadn't noticed? I withdraw into my head quite a bit when I'm jarred like that, and I think that my silence was uncomfortable for Borden. She eventually volunteered that her energy level had dropped off quite a bit and that she needed to get back to my place to rest for a while (Borden has physical stuff that affects her energy). I replied that from my perspective, there had been no clue that this had happened, and that the jarring of expectations had really thrown me off.

In response, she pointed to the way she was shopping in the newage store. "That's a classic sign of my energy dropping off; I was distracted by shiny things."

I responded that to my eyes, it looked like just the opposite: that she had lots of energy to look through the tarot cards and to shop in the deli. I additionally pointed out that when she called at me at the subway station, I thought she was planning to walk the rest of the way back to my place -- again, leading me to believe that she had lots of energy.

And then we finally talked about the moment when she said, "onion bagels will be fine." And I saw that as a key moment when our perceptions of what was going on diverged.

And by the end of the evening, I thought that we had worked that particular incident out.

A few days later, Borden sent me a copy of an post she'd written on another forum, talking about some of the stuff she was trying to process about the visit. In it, she said:

The energy thing is that she doesn't understand how come I am willing to give up on searching for something (a particular kind of bread) when we're out running errands, when a few minutes earlier I "seemed to have all the energy in the world" when I was in the aisles of the place that I discovered carries almost all the comfort foods of my people. I couldn't summon the energy or willingness to explain, although I tried. It feels like she wrote me off as capricious and as several other less complimentary things, though.

And I was pretty pissed off about the way she chose to characterize the incident. Especially given the fact that I thought we'd had a pretty good talk about it all afterward.

Hokay. The thing that I think I'm starting to understand about these interactions is this: when Borden has been talking about these incidents, the semantic content I've been reading into her words is, "this is what transpired. This is what happened. These are the facts." And my somewhat indignant response to that perceived content has been: "No, I think you've omitted these salient points."

What I'm only now starting to wonder is if, really, the semantic content of her words is, "Ouch. I am in pain." And my response to that content should have been substantially different.

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Can I say RJ's history with indirect communication?

Actually, I don't know if you were around for that thread or not. It was The Thread That Ate alt.poly. At one point there were a few hundred posts a day just to that one thread, and it went on for about 6 months. What you've just described above it typical of the whole indirect vs direct communicator problem.

Ugh. Hell, yes - I think I would have interpreted things the way you did. And this disconnect between the two of you further reinforces my feelings that what went wrong was due to one hell of a misunderstanding. Not that it helps much now :(

[angilong.livejournal.com]

What I'm only now starting to wonder is if, really, the semantic content of her words is, "Ouch. I am in pain." And my response to that content should have been substantially different.

This sounds really familiar. I tend to forget to wonder *why* something is being said. And often, the answer to that question is more important than what's actually being said. So I'm all focused on what's being directly said, and maybe ready to pick it apart or argue with it, when that's not really what's important at all.

Problem, for me, often is that even after we do address what the "real" problem was, and the other person feels better... *I* can't let go of the things that were actually directly said. (Sigh.)

[angilong.livejournal.com]

goofy Kissing Jessica Stein reference

Speaking of that movie... (and Spoiler Alert):

What ever happened to the guys Helen was dating? If she was still dating those guys, why wasn't it okay for Jessica to date Josh (was that his name?) too? If Helen was poly before, then why would she suddenly go monogamous on us? Especially without telling us?

Inquiring Minds Want To Know.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, I asked where you were going for two reasons:

1) I couldn't keep up with how fast you were walking (I have a bad hip, and some other stuff, that sometimes makes me pretty slow, or at least slower than a B.C.), and I was a bit unhappied at being left behind, and

2) I didn't have the energy for more stores, particularly not more food stores. You knew I am a recovering anorexic, and I told you that sometimes I get kind of overwhelmed in grocery stores. So when you told me we were going to the subway and instead you took us into this bread store and then turned to me and told me to choose some bread, I felt panicky and put on the spot and Just Wanted Out.

Eventually I could see that you were trying to do something you thought would be an expression of caring. And, hell, maybe for most of the people in the world it would have come across that way. But it didn't.

I apologized then for snapping at you. If you'd like, and if it would help, I will apologize again, publically, in writing, whatever.

But...

Yeah, there's a but. The but is that I felt like the reason you kept bringing up the snapping after I apologized is that you were mad at me for being insufficiently grateful for something -- which was pretty hard to deal with, given that I had tried to avert any unpleasantness by asking where we were going. (I knew I was pretty close to exhausted, and I didn't want to snap at you or anything else.)

As for the possibility of walking home in the rain, with my hip I don't think that was very likely just then, although it probably would have been a better use of my energy/discomfort than snapping at you.

I'm sorry for all the difficulty I caused you. If I could go back and do things differently, I might have saved both of us a lot of pain.