Recently I discovered that my partner thought I was angry at him for the first six months of our relationship. My closest friends admitted the same. The cause? My text messages apparently.
If someone asked me a question, like “Meet in town at eight?” or “I’ll be home a bit later from work tonight, so can you preheat the oven for dinner?” I will reply with “Okay” and “Yeah”. Normal, standard answers revealing exactly my position. I was ok to meet at 8. Yeah, I’ll preheat the oven.
What was the problem? Allegedly, these are the texts people might send when they are actually not ok to meet at 8 and they don’t want to preheat the oven. My loved ones explained that these are basic phrases in the beginner-level passive-aggressive phrase book, the kind you learn on Duo Lingo on day one.
The simple “okay” can actually mean “I’m begrudgingly agreeing to meet at 8 even though I know you’re just planning our catchup as an out for your earlier Tinder date”.
There is no need to ask me “what’s wrong?” when I am upset. He will already know because I will have supplied an itemised list of why I am annoyed, summarised in dot point form on the front page of the briefing document
That “yeah” could translate to “you said it was your turn to make dinner and now you’re offloading it onto me yet again, I’m thinking about leaving you, you absolute pox.”
Which is very confusing to me, because I would just say that in the first place.
Early in our relationship, my partner said “I like how you can just say how you feel,” as if I had any control over the matter.
There is no need to ask me “what’s wrong?” when I am upset. The answer will not be a sigh followed by a pointed “NOTHING!” He will already know because I will have supplied an itemised list of why I am annoyed, summarised in dot point form on the front page of the briefing document.
Depending on the situation, my explanation of why I am mad may include colour coded graphs. For example, these may show how the longer the hole in our wall (that he made) remains unfixed (x axis) corresponds to the number of times I have to repeatedly remind him to fix it (y axis).
Using an overhead projector and a laser pointer, I will show the red line trending upwards which shows an exponential increase in the likelihood of me getting crankier and him getting yelled at.
We decided early on we would rather argue for 10 minutes than have 10 days of awkward silence, followed by quick apologies and a plan to prevent it from being an issue again
If I’m feeling creative, I might even put on a puppet show of all the ways I have been recently disappointed in this relationship. Just as a wee treat to him, to keep the magic alive.
We decided early on we would rather argue for 10 minutes than have 10 days of awkward silence, followed by quick apologies and a plan to prevent it from being an issue again.
In fairness he might now regret his “say everything you feel” partner choice. Would he prefer the peace that frosty passive aggression offers?
On New Years Eve we had a house party and in that lovely Irish way, friends of friends started to filter in to reduce our clean glasses count and add to the craic.
As did the apologies. “I’m so sorry. Is it ok everyone is here? You can just tell me and I’ll get rid of them,” came the entreaties from guests who, being Irish, would rather crucify themselves right there on your good carpet than be responsible for putting you out in any way.
It was unnecessary. If I wanted them to leave, they would know about it. I would stand on the table banging a pot yelling “Get the f**k out my house, I want to go to bed”, as I have done before and may do again when I have sleepless toddlers of my own, who knows.
In Ireland I struggle with the indirect communication style favoured in both professional and personal circles. I feel like a naive gom, because I assumed people generally meant exactly what they said.
I had been living under the ignorant assumption that if someone was mad at you, they would just tell you. No need to let your anxiety trick you into analysing your last conversation
I found out the hard way that “would you mind doing that when you get a chance?” sometimes means “you need to get that done in an hour or there will be immediate and terrible consequences for us both”.
This may seem obvious to the initiated, but to me this is akin to delivering instructions in the manner of wizened old crones guarding treasures in fairytales. “If knowledge is what you seek for thee, you must answer these riddles three!”
I had been living under the ignorant assumption that if someone was mad at you, they would just tell you. No need to let your anxiety trick you into analysing your last conversation, to see if the way they said “bye” instead of “goodbye” indicates that your friend hates you, and actually so does everyone else because you’re a terrible person.
Then I moved to Ireland and realised it’s actually more complicated than that. As an Italian friend explained, “When someone has a problem with you in Ireland, they would rather tell everyone else but you.”
Great.
So now I’ve gone from reassuring others that I’m not mad at them, to wondering if I’ve missed the morse code and smoke signals that show they’re actually mad at me.
But I’m crap at reading them, so they’ll just have to send me a report of what I did to upset them so I can fix it, illustrative graphs and all.
