Tag Archives: relationships

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A Nickel and Two Pennies for Your Thoughts

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Only 7% of what people glean when they listen to us is verbal. That’s staggering. It’s life-changing. It’s monumental. It means that someone who never talks could, hypothetically, be 93% as effective a communicator as someone who talks.

Albert Mehrabian, in the 1960s, ran a bunch of experiments and discovered that humans make emotional and value-laden judgments based almost solely on non-verbal cues. We don’t really care what a person is saying so long as they are saying it in a nice tone and confidently and while leaning in a bit and while making eye contact.

I suppose this is something rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists have known for quite some time. But we don’t really like rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists. We lump them in with used-car salesmen. They are slimy and tricky and deceitful. The devil probably is the  smoothest being in the world. I wrote a story once where the devil was a man in a white suit. He looked a little bit like James Stewart. He sounded like your father and patted you on the back like an old friend. That’s the only way I can understand the devil.

I think it’s easy to start thinking that people who are more concerned with the 93% non-verbal cues are just intrinsically crafty. But rhetoricians, politicians, pick-up artists, used-car salesmen, and the devil aren’t slimy and crafty because they care about that 93% but because they are using that 93% to sell lies.

What would it look like, I wonder, if we started to use that 93% to love and in truth. We tell people all the time that we love them. We tell our friends, our family, that guy who just gave up his seat in class so that you and I can sit next to each other. And most of the time people don’t believe us. And why should they? “I love you” only makes up 7% of what they are hearing. But what if, every time we told someone we loved them, we lowered our voice a little, looked them straight in the eye, leaned forward, and touched them on the shoulder? What if every confession of love was made to seem like a secret? What if every compliment, every favor, every piece of encouragement was delivered like the most private and personal and valuable of statements? It would be staggering. It would be life-changing. It would be monumental.

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Unconditional Friendship

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My parents always used to tell me that I had to be a friend to have friends. I always thought that advice was pretty lame. Popular kids had friends because people wanted to be their friends, not because they were friendly. No one wanted to be my friend, I argued. I was perfectly nice and polite and thoughtful but no one wanted to be my friend. But then I started befriending people who had a lot of friends, and I realized that they have a lot of friends precisely because they are great friends, themselves. Parents 1, Spencer 0.

Friendship is such a slippery thing. We’ve been reading this guy in my Medieval English class named Aelred of Rievaulx. The last thing Aelred ever wrote was this dialogue called Spiritual Friendship. I think that’s pretty cool because Aelred didn’t die suddenly. He kind of died of old age so he knew it was coming, and yet, he chose to compose his last piece of writing on friendship. Up to this point, ‘Red (yeah, me and ‘Red are on a nickname basis) had written histories or traditional spiritual treatises. So it was kind of a departure for him too. The really cool thing about ‘Red is that people really liked him. And who better to write a piece on friendship than someone who is well liked?

Does't 'Red look friendly?

In Book Three of Spiritual Friendship two of Father Aelred’s students are giving him a hard time about a friend who he has that does some questionable things. They ask ‘Red how it is that he continues to be his friend even though this friend has a temper every once in a while. Aelred just so lovingly says to them, “once I had received him as a friend, he could never lose my love.” I love that. I love it for two reasons. 1. It is so very contradictory to what I do and 2. It is what love is.

This is so not how I treat friendship. If someone is hard to get along with, if we fight every once in a while, if we have tough conversations, I just give up on the relationship. I find new people (or, more accurately, let new people find me), and I move on with my life. But the problem with that is that when I stop treating that person like a friend, I am assuming that I am a perfectly agreeable person to get along with. And that’s just not true. I’m a pain in the butt to get along with. I complain constantly; I behave selfishly; and about one day a week I skip showering. I am extremely difficult to get along with, but thankfully, there are some people who show me some grace. And they are all beautifully wonderful people. And so when I stop talking to a friend, I’m basically saying, “Hey, I know you showed me grace a ton in the past, but I’m not willing to do the same for you so don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And that’s wonderfully horrible.

But grace is a really important component of what love really is. It’s a choice. It’s a verb. And people sometimes understand this with romantic relationships but almost no one ever thinks about it with friendship. We can choose to love our friends even when they are being difficult. I think that gets really hard because we don’t want to give something to someone that he or she isn’t going to return. (This is part of the reason why ‘Red thinks we should choose friends wisely.) We want to know that the time we put into a relationship is going to be returned. I don’t think we can do that though. I think we have to love first when it comes to friends.

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Words are Sticks and Stones

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Let’s compare two different sayings about speech. First, the ever popular, Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. And then this, lesser known one: “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” That last one is from Solomon’s Proverbs. All the Proverbs are pretty good. You should read them, like now. Seriously. Stop wasting your time reading my blog, find a copy of Solomon’s Proverbs, and read them. And then come back if you want to.

All my life, I’ve been someone who is hurt by words. I’m hurt by words even when people have no intention of hurting me with words. And for a long time, I thought that made me weak. I never had a broken bone from either sticks or stones, but words always hurt me. People would always tell me that I should stop caring what other people thought about me, as if it was a disease. And if I just took the cure of not caring, I would become a healthier person.

And so I learned how to use sarcasm. People were sarcastic with me, and I was sarcastic back because I thought that was what was expected of me. Sarcasm drifted into all of my relationships. My romantic relationships, my relationship with my brother, my relationships with my parents, my friends, my acquaintances. But I wasn’t all that good at sarcasm. If sarcasm was an actual language (like some people say it is), I was nowhere near fluent so a lot of times I would just give up and be sincere with people. And that’s where you start to get into trouble. Because when you are sincere with people, human nature is to start expecting people to be sincere with you. (My psych professor tells me that is why Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud stopped being friends – Jung was mad that Freud wouldn’t open up to him.)

The verse from Proverbs is always reentering my life. I think about it a lot. Because the truth is that words hurt. And they hurt everyone. Not just me. It took me a long time to figure that out because people don’t like showing that they are hurt by words, but they are. I think the first relationship where I eradicated sarcasm fully was with my brother. It took time, and it was hard at times, but my brother and I hardly ever are sarcastic with each other now, and it’s brought us really close. It’s amazing how deep a relationship can go when you are honest about how much you care about each other and what you like and dislike about each other without the veil of sarcasm.

The horrible thing about sarcasm is that once you start, you think it’s a way of life, that it’s natural. And so even when you are conscious about it, it pops up every once in a while and stabs people you care about. I stab my parents with sarcasm all the time. And I hate that.

A very close friend and I communicate almost solely through sarcasm. And it’s horrible because it escalates and escalates until one of us says something that is really hurtful, and then it feels like we may not be able to talk to each other anymore. I recently admitted to her that I can’t communicate in that way anymore, that it hurts me and that I know it hurts her. And it was hard because I felt like I was being weak. But it seems silly to choose to live in the range of swords when you can be in a peaceful meadow instead.

I know it’s going to be tempting to say something sarcastic in response to this post. But I challenge you to actually think about it, and to respond sincerely.