Saturday, November 14, 2009

Communications - Take IV: A Confession

Two recent triggers gave me the courage to confess about this little problem of mine, although I was drafting this post in my mind for a long time. The first trigger is a blogpost about identifying yourself with a description in a text. I don't remember reading such text, at least not recently. I'd like to think the reason is that my personality is more complex than a descriptive, even well written, paragraph. The other possible reasons are much less compelling (not reading enough, not remembering in general, not paying attention to details), so I'll just conveniently ignore them. But it is possible that a description matches one facet of my personality. This actually happened on page 87 of Marianne Legato's "Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget", under the topic "Say What You Mean" (the second trigger I referred to). According to the author, 85% of women (me included) don't say (mostly to their partners) what they really want or mean. We expect them to read our minds and respond to our unverbalized wishes. When they fail doing so, we conclude that our relationship is just not working. There might be a few reasons why we act like that, but most probably it's a combination between our brain structure and upbringing.

In my special case, I take this even further (you didn't really expect me to define something 85% of women do as "my little problem", right?). After going through a long thought process, involving analyzing different possibilities and reaching a conclusion, I am surprised when the others don't have a clue about my conclusion. That's because I never told them. I think/feel I did, but I actually didn't. Is it a 'senior moment'? Am I having Alzheimer's? Do I expect others to reach the same 'logical' conclusion? All of the above?

Now don't tell me you don't understand how this image is related to the subject. It's Citrine. According to a website, it helps overcoming difficulty in verbalizing thoughts and feelings, among its other healing powers (if you believe in such things). Now I'll be really disappointed if I don't get a few of these as a present. Preferably in the form of jewelry.

P.S. Just realized how relevant my previous post is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A lot of food for thought there, but one conclusion didn't seem to follow. I often don't tell my husband what I really want or mean, but I haven't concluded that the relationship doesn't work. ~Miriam