“If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments.”
They Might Be Giants, “Snowball in Hell”
I am convinced that man has evolved a very sophisticated method for hiding his true intentions behind vagueness, ambiguity, and other surreptitious tactics—all in the attempt to convince others to do our bidding without actually coming out and saying what that bidding is.
Why? The amount of energy it takes to involve ourselves in this subterfuge is breathtaking. If harnessed, perhaps we’d solve the world’s energy crisis. To be straightforward, to be totally honest, to say what we mean without hiding behind anything is more than just difficult for some—it seems an impossibility. In the days of political correctness, talking points, and talking heads who speculate without ever actually reporting something useful, perhaps straight talking has even become a lost art.
What is it that we have to hide behind all of this story telling and ambiguity? What makes this approach seem so necessary? Pride? Self-protection? Self-preservation?
Vagueness leaves a great deal of room for misunderstandings. It places the burden of interpretation squarely on the shoulders of the other person. You are providing the other person with a hint of what it is you’re trying to say, and then you stand back and expect them to uncover your full meaning. It is a treasure hunt for the truth.
Ambiguity is also a subconscious manipulation. Most of the time, I don’t believe it’s intentional. The other person is not consciously trying to manipulate the listener, yet they secretly long for others to fathom their true desire—without ever making themselves vulnerable by saying it.
This drain of energy does not just happen on the part of the listener but also on the part of the person doing all of this confused rambling. You rarely get what you want this way, which reinforces the faulty model even further. “I never get what I want, so I might as well not even voice it.” And it becomes true. You never get what you want because you never voice it. You never risk having someone say “no,” but this also means they can never say “yes.”
Making a Case for Our Wants
To say precisely what we mean and what we want should be the easiest thing in the world, yet it has become the hardest. People say they want the truth, they want honesty, but they rarely mean it. What they really mean is this: Tell me the truth when it suits me to hear it, when it is not negative, and when it is not hurtful. Tell me the truth, but make certain to phrase it in a way that is soft and not filled with anything harsh or prickly. And when we begin to put such conditions on truth telling, it becomes harder to do. What we have to say, what we need, isn’t always free of hard edges or prickly points. Sometimes, what we have to say may be hurtful to the other person no matter what. Sometimes, what we want and don’t want is going to be contrary to what others want and don’t want. We could tell them lies to make them feel better, but then what good are we serving? We could deny saying the things that we truly want so that others will not think poorly of us, or so we don’t have to suffer from rejection or disappointment if others want something different . . . but in the end, what are we getting? We are guaranteeing that we will not get what we want. We are putting ourselves in a position where we are not receiving Truth if that Truth would be too hurtful.
So it should be simple! Go back to telling the truth. Be honest. Say what you want. And this sounds wonderful. I want to do this. I like Truth. I like Honesty. I abhor vagueness, and ironically, I don’t like it when others tell me long and drawn out stories when there is supposed to be a point. If I want to hear a story, I’ll ask for one. But then, here I am telling stories for almost everything. It’s hardwired. It is programmed. Neurons are firing along a set path, and how do I re-program? How do I free myself of decades’ worth of story telling and self-protection in order to even access the truth?
As one who has been dubbed “Darth Vague,” I must say, it has never really been my intention to confound. I am certainly not being consciously manipulative. Nor am I consciously waiting for others to twist my words in just the right way so that all the little colored squares of my emotional puzzle line up appropriately, revealing what it is I truly want. It is easy to become confused by our desires while also trying to figure out what is reasonable to expect from others. Sometimes, this attempt to determine “reasonable expectations” vs. “desire fulfillment” can leave us frozen, unable to determine the best course of action or the way in which to communicate our feelings.
The key, perhaps, is to separate the two. Our desires exist. They are what they are, and it is true that they may not all be reasonable. Those around us may not always be able to supply us with the things we desire, or do the things we ask of them. But failing to express ourselves due to a fear of rejection, or the assumption that none of our desires are reasonable and that our needs cannot be fulfilled by others only guarantees that what we receive may be exactly what we’ve asked for: nothing.
Human beings are not mind readers. It is true that we can determine certain patterns over a period of time and with enough familiarity, but I think we put ourselves in danger of frequent dissatisfaction and misunderstandings if we just proceed under the assumption that others can intuit anything. Requiring others to intuit our needs or wants is yet another form of avoidance. It’s another way we try to protect ourselves from rejection and disappointment. If they can intuit what we want, we don’t have to say it. If we don’t have to say it, then we aren’t running the risk of making ourselves vulnerable.
My Bologna Has a First Name: It’s Called Diplomacy
If indeed the art of truth-telling and straightforward talk has been lost, at least we have developed companion art forms. One such creative method of communication is called diplomacy. Diplomacy can be defined as “handling people in such a way that there is little or no ill will.” This is what is considered a necessary form of manipulation where we talk of things in a specific way, or make light of things that may be bad or unpleasant so that the other person doesn’t feel bad or responsible for bad things. This is just as useful in business as it is in interpersonal relationships, for obvious reasons. Nobody likes being the bad guy who points out to the boss when some system is incompetent or not running the way it should. We have to think long and hard about how to sugarcoat the facts. Equally, no one likes to hear their friends tell them when they’re acting like a jerk. No one likes a conversation that begins with, “You know what your problem is?”
It takes a lot of skill to say what needs to be said in a way that will always sound unthreatening to others. But it’s also exhausting. When saying what we want or don’t want also becomes a matter of diplomacy, we may end up losing sight of what it is we’re actually trying to say in the first place. We don’t want others to have ill will towards us, and as rational human beings, we realize that our wants are not always going to coincide with the wants of others. We try to save everyone hassle. Then we find ourselves saying yes when we really want to say no. We find ourselves remaining silent when something important needs to be said.
We also find ourselves full of justifications and stories and explanations for why we’ve done something, bought something, said something, desired something . . . it can never be just what it is. And when we sacrifice what we want for what others might want or need, we view this as a sign of maturity. Certainly, there is something to this. Sometimes, we must do exactly that. Compromise is a critical part of any relationship. But we’re not talking about selfishness here; we are talking about knowing our own desires and being brave enough to own them. At no time does compromise or acknowledging the needs of others mean that we should lose sight of or completely abandon our own desires in the process—or worse, lose the courage to voice them once we know what they are. After all, how can we effectively compromise—a settlement of differences by mutual concessions—if we don’t know our initial claim?
Creating Perspective
Growing up, I had a very strict father. He would rarely let me or my brother do things outside of our house—go to sleepovers, play with our friends, or even call them on the telephone. Receiving his permission to do something we wanted was rare, so this asking became an event. My mother always knew how much fear we felt in approaching our father with our requests. She would try to calm our fears simply by saying, “The worse he can say is no.” Of course, for us, at the time, this saying no was the worst thing we could imagine. But moving into adulthood, we must learn to put these things into perspective.
The worse he/she can say is no. What then? What will you suffer? Rejection? (Of a relationship, a partnership, or a job?) Loss of pride? Will it hurt your sense of self-worth? If it is more than a momentary disappointment, from which you can move on, most likely there are larger problems within you that need addressing. I promise you that sometimes, people will say NO. You are not always going to get what you want. You are most certainly going to be disappointed—just as you will disappoint others. This is simply a fact of life. But I also promise you that sometimes, you will say what you want, and you will actually get it.
Just finally being able to own what you want, to truly be in possession of your own needs and desires, can be a liberating experience. It’s easier to move forward when you know the direction in which you’d like to head—but if you’re trying to hide it from yourself, so afraid your path will be blocked, then you are never going to get anywhere by anything other than chance. You’re waiting for someone else to move you along. You might as well wait for the wind to ferret out your desires and make your dreams come true . . . it is useless waiting.
The more you practice the art of straight speaking, the better at it you will become. At first, you may be a bit clumsy. You will feel yourself wanting to launch into a story, or to justify, or to make light of your needs to soften the blow should the other person shoot down your request. But the more you can access these feelings, the better you will know yourself. The more you can access your feelings and express them to others, the better others will know you as well, and this can create an opportunity for deeper intimacy—not the fairytale sort, where everyone is a mind reader and intuits every fanciful whim, but the kind where people honestly say what is on their minds and in their hearts, in simple terms, and the other person is free to process it without the need to develop psychic powers.
Finally, once we are fully engaged in this interplay—opening ourselves up to the process of asking, giving, and receiving—we may find that both “No” and “Yes” can lead us down equally interesting paths in life.
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