Tell a man you love him a thousand times…

Hello Internet! How are you doing? I’m glad to hear it! Oh how am I doing? Well I’m okay. Honestly I’m not really great. But I’m truly doing all the better for your asking!

I’ve got a story to tell!

I recently met someone who noticed turmoil I was going through. The initial comment was very kind, something about the words we use are useless, it is the way we are made to feel that is important. And the person recommended a book that I was told describes a way of life: non violent communication.

Then amazingly enough the very next day someone else I know and respect said they listened to the book. The same book! I guess it is time to read.

Hmm. A bit of background. The turmoil I’ve been in is that in certain relationships I’ve been made to feel, well, irrelevant? I’m not sure that is the best word for what I’ve felt, but that’s the one I’ll use at the moment. And it is painful when I’ve tired to tell the persons how I’m made to feel, and they’ll double down on whatever they said to make me feel even less relevant.

Tell a man you love him a thousand times, and he may believe you. Show a man you hate him once and he will believe you forever.

I remember one recent situation where I was trying to describe an encounter, and I used the phrase “a thousand times”. No, at the time I didn’t think it was hyperbole. I had not counted, but at the point when I said it I was exasperated, and stressed, and feeling quite irrelevant. So I said it with pain in my heart, but I was trying to get to a more relevant part of the discussion. Should I have validated my claim? Well, maybe. But I didn’t think it was relevant to validate the claim, whether it was a hundred, or a thousand, or 20,000 was not relevant for the conversation. It was relevant in comparison to another number, and the other number was a known order of magnitude less than this number.

The other person derailed the conversation with confusion and frustration by arguing that it was only eight hundred and seventy three times (or something like that) versus my “overstatement” of one thousand. While at the moment I had not counted the number of times the thing had happened, it was actually irrelevant to the way I was made to feel. I had tried to explain this so many times to my friend, and my words were ineffectual. Even if it was one time, the edge of that sword was extremely painful, and discussing painful things is, well, painful.

The end result

The end result? My friend and I never resolved the conflict because they derailed the conversation with a meaningless argument. As it turns out, I went back and looked. It was more than a thousand. I stopped counting at a thousand. So does that help me? No. It doesn’t. One time, one hundred times, one thousand times. Eight hundred and seventy three times? All are irrelevant.

I’m left with this. I really did want to work it out with my old friend. So what could I have done to eliminate the opportunity of my friend to bash me in the middle of the discussion with “it’s only 800 times!” ? Are there tools that I can learn to reduce or prevent the other person from derailing a conversation? Are there techniques I can learn to get conversations back on track after they go off the rails?

I don’t know.

Nonviolent communication

The person I recently met recommended that there are tools and techniques that will help me on my journey, mentioning something like “I hardly ever say anything without being asked, but I can tell you are open”.

Those were encouraging words.

I hope to learn.