The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [82]
Conversation’s challenges are as varied as we, but fall into distinct categories. Active: to ingratiate, confront, appease, mediate, seduce, persuade, oppose, rebuke . . . And defensive: parrying unwelcome approaches, fielding criticism, diverting attack.
Hardest are conversations with the wounded, whether or not the injury is ours to heal or repeal. What do you say to a person sliding down the razor blade of life? Nothing can feel easier than the wrong thing. You might tell yourself, or him, or her, to let sleeping dogs lie; no use crying over spilled milk. Countless platitudes are on hand to block a messy turn in conversation; arguably, clichés were invented for that very purpose (“shut up” disguised as cockle-warming folk wisdom). All are alibis for engaged sympathy.
What is wrong with skirting sore points? Often it is a shrewd kindness: The shoulder to cry on can get soggy, undesirable by association with past woes, and agony aunts can turn nag, unable to hear when advice is no longer sought. But say nothing, and if a problem is grave, contrary to King Lear’s admonition to reticent Cordelia, something will come of nothing, and it won’t be nice.
➺ Rule two: Assuming conversation is difficult makes it so
Although challenges exist, expecting the worst is what tangles us in knots. Many men are silenced by shame at sharing fear, and neither ovaries nor estrogen make women any less gauche. Mortally ill Sarah Hitchin wrote heartbreakingly of being penalized by friends, unable to believe she still liked “a giggle”; as if she, accessorized by cancer, was no longer she:
Now, if they do ring, they whisper, “How are you feeling in yourself?” One has lost contact after 24 years of friendship.
In the name of openness, unpleasant talk is increasingly out-sourced to paid ears, with the unintended consequence of impoverishing the communication skills and thinning the relationships of the rest of us—as was satirized by mordant teen novelist Nick Mc-Donell in this sterile exchange between a mother and daughter:
“Is something wrong? Is something upsetting you?”
“No.”
“Because I was thinking if something was, upsetting you that is, then you might want to go and see this doctor I know.”
“A shrink? [. . .] I don’t know what I would talk about.”
“Oh, you’d find things to talk about.”
Then the girl warms to the idea, recalling the bodacious lies her friends tell their shrinks.
➺ Rule three: Avoiding difficult conversation weakens relationships
Today indirect communication is on the up, with so many alternative methods to defer confrontation, fob people off: by email, letter, text.... We might imagine it easier to read bad news, to avoid misunderstanding. As if.
A friend’s parents-in-law are great letter-writers, issuing regular bulletins on how he should coddle his kids, cosset their daughter. No doubt they would be shocked to learn these land like a punch in his gut, read not, as written, in calm rumination, but amid the tug-of-war of toddler breakfast. They can’t suspect that using a one-way medium inherently renders their message a judgment; that not speaking, abdicating power over their voice’s inflection, ensures that it strikes their harassed son-in-law as hectoring, strident, a wee bit mad.
All communication is dialogue, its meaning not its speakers’ intentions, but its effect on sender and receiver. Want miscommunication?
How simpler than to bisect the dialogue?
If we ditch the myriad nonverbal cues that help meaning ring out loud and clear, if we lack messages from the other’s face, we can’t tell how news sinks in, adapt our words to its reception, incorporate new information, correct misperception, or stop before we say too much. And the person at the receiving end can’t hear our words’ emotional force, tone, let alone counter false impressions or exercise his right of reply.
To say writing obviates difficulty is like saying conversation is clearer wearing a blindfold and earplugs, in separate rooms.
➺ Rule four: Tough topics demand flexible conversation
Social scientist Michael