Read The Lost Art of Listening Online
Authors: Michael P. Nichols
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.
Listening Between Intimate Partners
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,
210
LISTENING IN CONTEXT
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.)
Listening Between Intimate Partners
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.
212
LISTENING IN CONTEXT
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!
Listening Between Intimate Partners
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
214
LISTENING IN CONTEXT
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.