The Lost Art of Listening (35 page)

Whenever you have a problem with someone, note what the person does

that bothers you; then consider what the other half of that pattern might

be. This might just give you the key to unlocking the problem.

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209

Complaint

Complement

“He doesn’t talk to me.”

He doesn’t like the way you listen.

“She’s not very affectionate.”

She has unspoken resentments.

“He’s selfish.”

He thinks you’re selfish.

“He never asks me how my day

You never ask him how his day

went.”

went.

The other half of the equation—your part—doesn’t have to be something

you do that causes the problem. It might just be your way of keeping it

going.

What Annoys You

What Perpetuates It

“He touches me in a way I don’t

You don’t show him how you like

like.”

to be touched.

He thinks “Here we go again.”

He never lets you get to the heart

of your concerns and makes you

feel that he understands.

Rhythms of Change in a Committed Relationship

Although the cycle of human life may be orderly, it isn’t a steady, continu-

ous march. Periods of growth and change are followed by times of relative

stability in which changes are consolidated. The good news is that life isn’t

one long uphill struggle; sometimes you reach a plateau and can coast. The

bad news is that you can’t stay forever in one place. Partnership, too, has

its cycles and seasons.

Courtship—what a lovely, old- fashioned word—is a time of opening

up and testing for compatibility. Enchanted by romance, the partners are

absorbed and engaged with each other. Conversation flows, and listening

comes easily. They find each other so novel and delightful. So attentive,

so interesting, so
interested.

Fascination makes them overlook gaps in listening. Something puts

her in mind of high school, and she asks him what it was like for him. He

reminisces fondly about his experience, but when he doesn’t reciprocate,

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doesn’t ask her what it was like for her, she thinks it’s an oversight. She’ll

get her turn later.

Young and in love, we take such pleasure in each other’s company

that sober considerations give way to dictates of the heart. Falling in love

is an act of imaginative creation. Later, our hearts may shrink, and with it

our eagerness to listen. But that’s later. Now, although we might be more

compatible with partners more like ourselves, nature’s urge to mix genes

draws us to the otherness of the other.

The great challenge of courtship is to come together

and still be yourself.

With love at stake, we lie a little. We tell tender lies, a few self-

protecting lies, and more than a few self- deluding lies. Looking back, we

wish we’d been more honest, hadn’t tried so hard to get our partners to

like us.

When courting couples move in the direction of their intentions,

trying to discover how far they can go together, it’s usually two steps for-

ward and one step back. Over the years a dozen or so couples have sought

me out for premarital counseling. What a good idea, I used to think.

Unfortunately, these encounters often turn out to be quite frustrating.

The people seeking help come not because they are amazingly cautious

but because they are amazingly mismatched. Despite that, most of them

have passed an emotional point of no return and intend to marry, no

matter what. Among the obstacles they will overcome is their own good

judgment.

If courtship were more conscious, people would pay more

attention to the quality of one another’s listening.

Among the most important things to find in a mate is someone who’s

easy to talk to. Making friends and being able to talk to each other is a far

more reliable guide than good looks, cleverness, or that dizzy feeling that

people call “falling in love.” (Try telling that to someone in love.)

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211

He Needs Space; She Wants Closeness1

He wants to be left alone and she wants attention. So she gives him atten-

tion and he leaves her alone.

Jack and Irene were a handsome couple, in their mid- thirties. Irene

was a pretty woman, with ash-blond hair and an energetic look. The day

they came to see me she was wearing a linen suit with a silk blouse. Jack,

tall and slender, wore jeans. She’d dressed up; he’d dressed down. Was it

just a different approach to this interview or a different approach to life?

“What brings you to therapy?” I asked, looking at both of them.

Jack answered first. “Well, I’m a little intolerant.”

“What does Irene do that’s hard to tolerate?”

They exchanged looks. Irene gave Jack a faint smile, and he turned

back to me. “She yammers. She makes assumptions, and there’s nothing

I can do about it—about what she assumes—so I give up and go on about

my business.”

“You mean, you pull away?”

“Well . . . yes.”

He went on to describe himself as a man who isn’t very emotional,

married to a woman who is.

I turned to Irene. “So, Jack is learning to be more tolerant and not

react to you. What would you say you’re learning?”

“I’m working real hard to identify and express my feelings to him. But

he always wants an explanation of
why
I feel upset. Sometimes you don’t

know why; you just know that you are.”

Jack’s response to Irene’s distress took the familiar form of an obses-

sional person trying to comfort an emotional one: He barraged her with

questions, all based on his own approach to emotion, which was to label

and compartmentalize it.

Irene felt things strongly without always being able to put them into

words. At these moments her husband could have comforted her by just

being there, holding her perhaps, but certainly not demanding that she

1In writing this revision I noticed a Freudian slip here—he “needs” space, but she only

“wants” closeness. Excuse me for a minute, my wife is trying to tell me something and I have

to cover my ears and start humming.

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stop crying and explain herself. The truth was that when Irene cried, Jack

worried that it might be about him, so he felt accused. His comfort took

the form of asking her to reassure him. “What’s the matter?” really meant

“Tell me you’re not mad at me.”

Jack went on to talk about Irene’s anger as the reason he didn’t listen

better. When Irene approached Jack in an excitable way, he became anx-

ious and responded by trying to be analytic or—if that failed—by distanc-

ing himself. His distance aggravated her emotionality, which then pushed

him even further away. Their failure to listen to each other wasn’t caused

by Irene’s emotionality or by Jack’s anxiety; it was the combination.

Jack thought Irene could break the pattern by toning down her emo-

tions. Irene thought Jack should learn to be a little more tolerant of her

feelings. Even as they talked, they played out the familiar progression.

Irene’s rising pressure made Jack anxious and defensive—or, to look at the

circular pattern from another angle—Jack’s inability to accept what she

was saying drove up her emotionality.

Finally I interrupted and told them the story of the North Wind. “One

day the North Wind and the Sun were arguing about which was the most

powerful force in nature. ‘I can churn up the seas and drive a blizzard,’ the

North Wind said. ‘Yes, but I can melt the snow and dry up a flood,’ the Sun

replied. Just then a man wearing a heavy overcoat happened by. ‘I know

how to settle this,’ said the Sun. ‘Let’s see who can make that man take off

his coat.’ The North Wind blew hard. But the harder he blew, the more

the man bundled up. Finally the Sun said, ‘My turn.’ The sun shone down

its warmth, and the man unbuttoned his coat. The Sun shone warmer, and

the man took off his coat.”

Irene and Jack smiled broadly.

“Irene, sometimes you come on like the North Wind. And I don’t

blame you, because it’s frustrating to feel shut out. And out of that frustra-

tion, either you give up or out comes the North Wind.”

“You’re right. I never thought of it that way.”

At this point Jack, feeling relieved, opened up and started to talk

about “needing” space.2 He had a lot of pressure at work, and when he

came home he needed time to decompress. And Irene was afraid to give

2See, I’m not the only one!

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213

him the breathing room he needed, the freedom to read or go for a walk or

spend time with his friends.

“Jack,” I said, “I could tell you understood the difference between

Irene being the North Wind and being the Sun. But you know, the guy

wearing the coat is in the story too. It’s both of them. The North Wind

blows, and he bundles up, and so the North Wind blows more, and he

bundles up more. He bundles up for a lot of good reasons—he has his

moods, his job is stressful, he needs his space, he likes to read . . . I respect

those things. But the bundling up is part of the problem.”

“I understand that,” Jack said. He went on to say that he’s been mak-

ing an effort. But, he admitted, “It’s not the easiest thing for me, to be

close.”

By now, the atmosphere in the session had changed. Jack and Irene

had begun to see how they were locked into a pattern in which they both

pushed each other to respond in a way they didn’t like.

Once Irene learns to see very clearly that coming on strong only

pushes Jack away, and
he
learns that keeping his distance only makes her

more anxious and persistent, they can figure out how to break their halves

of the cycle. Will that magically change everything? If you kiss a frog, will

he turn into a prince? Maybe not right away.

Balancing Intimacy and Independence

In accommodating to each other, couples must negotiate the space

between them as well as that separating their couplehood from the rest of

the world.

When you become intimate with someone, physically and emotion-

ally, you open up the boundary around your private self to let the other in

close. Being in love is to want no distance between you, but a wall of pri-

vacy protecting the two of you from outside intrusion. This closeness and

privacy make conversation intimate, with the obvious rewards and risks.

Minimal self- reliance exists between two people when they call each

other at work all the time, when neither has separate friends or indepen-

dent interests, if they come to view themselves only as a pair rather than

also as two individuals. Under such pressure of togetherness conversation

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is constrained by the threat of conflict. If you’re alone with someone on a

lifeboat, you’d better not argue.

In contrast, people who put independence over connection do little

together, have their own rooms, take separate vacations, have independent

checking accounts, are more invested in their careers or outside relation-

ships than in each other, and don’t talk much. Listening is limited because

they have so many distractions.

Most couples don’t start out disengaged; the wall that grows up

between them is a product of unresolved conflict. Often it’s not specific

transgressions so much as the not listening, the not hearing. They both

feel as if the other doesn’t care. That they do care very much but are too

afraid of conflict to listen doesn’t alter the feeling of being unappreciated.

Some people pay a lot for peace.

Typically, partners come from families with differing degrees of separ-

ateness and togetherness. Each partner tends to be more comfortable with

the kind of relationship he or she grew up with. Since these expectations

differ, a struggle ensues over how much to share and how much to keep to

yourself. This may be the most difficult aspect of learning to listen to a new

mate— developing sensitivity to a different conversational style.

In the early stages of a couple’s relationship, passion can mask difficul-

ties in communicating. Some partners have broken away from their families,

and they come together with an unchecked urgency for connection. Such

fusion, such boundarylessness, the desideratum of love’s young dream, is hard

to sustain, especially when those in its thrall isolate themselves from family

and friends. Couples who expect all their needs to be met in one all- fulfilling

relationship are in for the rudest of awakenings. One reason people get too

little out of intimate relationships is that they expect too much.

Tension in a couple can be resolved in one of three ways: working

it out, triangulation, or distancing. When distancing between intimate

partners is unchecked by a clear boundary around their relationship, the

two often drift apart.