The Imputed Please

Tell me about the last time you had Sunday supper with the whole family and your grandmother said, “Pass the mustard greens.” and you yelled at her “Can’t you fucking say ‘Please’ you old bitch? Would it kill you? You are always (see below) telling me what to do and I’m not taking your controlling shit any longer, you want the mustard greens you got a walker by your chair and the rest of the fucking day to waddle your sad ass to the other end of the table and get them.”

I’m guessing you wouldn’t expect a Benjamin in your Christmas card that year, and you can pretty much expect her first call on Monday morning would be to the lawyer that wrote her Will.

Without going into your relationship with your grandmother (she may be worse than JR Ewing for all I know) we do not, as a rule, require that every request be preceded by a “please” or followed by a “thank you.” We give the person making the request the benefit of the doubt, we allow them an imputed please. If someone at work says “You got the stapler?” we don’t respond “What? Are you saying I stole the stapler?”

Nope, we usually say, “Sure.” We hand it over and don’t think about it again. Same with the mustard greens.

But in a personal relationship, in our relationships with our wives, maybe our parents and our siblings, for some reason, we may not be so kind.

In personal relationships (and here I’m talking about troubled relationships) every request, every communication is fed through a check list of resentments, past bad acts, suspicion and fear. Every word is parsed for meaning, every tone is analyzed, every body position is noted and we rank them all from one to ten, with one being the worst possible interpretation and ten being the a lesser offensive interpretation and maybe number ninety-eight is the one we attribute to the guy asking for the stapler and then we promptly disregard two through ten and go with number one which is “this is more of the same shit that shows she doesn’t love, respect or care for me.”

“Get some peanut butter” becomes not just a simple request for tasty legume paste but an interpolated attack “don’t even come back without the PB. You always forget it you insensitive bastard, and your kids suffer every day because you never do what you’re supposed to do.” Skippy’s becomes a proxy for every hurt your wife has inflicted upon you and the legion of those slights you imagine she intended. It’s not just the peanut butter, it’s the rest of your fucking life and nothing is going to change.

It can be a bit overwhelming. Maybe you don’t explode. Maybe you don’t give tit for tat with some sort of passive aggressive behavior, maybe you just note it and add it to your list of resentments, but even that is adding a bale of hay to your already overburdened relationship camel’s back.

What if you simply imputed a “Please”. What if, the next time you see a note or hear a request that could be interpreted as controlling or dictatorial you simply added a mental “please” to it. “Please get some peanut butter” is an entirely different experience.

“Why should I? She’s telling me what to do and I have every right to resent it.”

Can’t argue with you there, but you have a right to a divorce too, and that defensiveness is leading right towards one. You’re reading this because you want to improve your relationship with your wife, you want to be a better man, and the bottom line is that a better man is going to impute a “Please” because anything you would do for your granny or the guy needing the stapler you should be willing to do for your wife.

OOPS

I don't get many questions on this blog, but I get a few over the occasional glass of wine and I thought this answer merited sharing... my friend was facing a hard decision and afraid that he would make the wrong choice. Enough preamble, this is the email I sent him the next day (parenthetical added.)

Last night I parted with the observation that you cannot make mistakes… and upon reflection that seems a bit ambiguous.

What I mean is I don’t much like the concept of mistake…. Assigning blame and recrimination for past actions.

If you listen to your heart, are honest with yourself and make the best decision you can at the time you have done your work. The decision you make may or may not bring the results you desire, but even if it causes WWIII it is not a “mistake”, and especially less so if you take the opportunity to review your decision making process, challenge the assumptions that underlay it and look to find your blindsides that lead to your decision…. In other words, you make it a learning experience.. or an afgo. (Another Fucking Growth Opportunity.... read the book)

So let go of the concept that you can make a mistake here. It places too much stress and front ends too much culpability for a circumstance which is not entirely in your control. In short, the fear of making a mistake will cloud your judgment. You have to make a decision, and the better man understands that he will live with the consequences of that decision, good or bad, because the decision was his to make and he made it freely.

Use the tools you have, make the decision, let go of your expectations and see what happens.

ALLWAYS and NEVER

The issue I wanted to put on the table for your consideration are the words “never” and “always.” This came up at one of my weekly meetings with men and I want to give a hat tip to John C. who is always perceptive.

 Always and never are interesting words because they don’t describe the real world. As Asimov so famously observed “the only constant is change” and nothing in the physical world is “always” or “never.” Reality is like a statistical distribution curve, there are always the fee tails, the outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule. So when someone says “Blank is always soandso” you know they are speaking from an emotional rather than rational point of view because it is an impossible statement. It is like dividing by zero, or saying “a cubed equals b cubed plus c cubed” it is a seemingly rational mathematical formulae, but it is an impossibility. Likewise, so is “Blank is always soandso.”

So let’s bring this down out of the theoretical and into the nitty gritty of relationships.

When your beloved comes home and says, in an angry voice “You always leave the door open.” Your first response, if you are novitiate in the ways of being a better man, is to see that blatant falsehood as an attack, as blaming you for something you don’t do, wouldn’t do, or at least if you did do there was a damn good reason for it.

 Admittedly, the door might have been open when your beloved came home, but clearly it is not “always” open and more to the point since your last argument about heating the neighborhood you have been conscientious about closing the door for which you’ve gotten absolutely no credit and a quick survey of the house would show to a certitude that all the doors and windows are closed, were closed, and have only been opened as necessary for egress and ingress, so you might say “don’t start with that” or “That’s the first time the door’s been open in six weeks, stop bitching.”  And we know how these theoretical conversations are going to end: badly

 Note this, even if you are absolutely correct. Even if you had been closing and locking the door with the assiduity of the vault keeper at Gringotts, even if you had locked the door not just three minutes ago but a burglar  had slipped the bolts in anticipation of stealing you baseball collection only to be scared away by the headlights of your beloved’s car, understand this: it doesn’t matter.

Your honey telegraphed where she was coming from when she said “always.” When we say “always” or “never” we (yes, WE. This bit of irrationality isn’t limited to women) are announcing that we are in an irrational state and if there is one other fundamental truth to this universe it is that you cannot reason with an irrational person.

Stack up all the facts, call in the witnesses, catch the burglar down the street and have him confess and she’s still going to be angry. No one who is out of control has ever calmed down when someone said “calm down” and if you try to reason with them you by citing facts and appealing to logic you are just going to make it worse and end up in a fight where your feelings get hurt and you start attacking back with some perceived fault of your partner (you spend too much money, you always expect me to to … whatever.)

“But it’s not fair!” you say and perhaps you’re right but life isn’t fair. I promise you everyone sailing through the air after being hit by a beer truck is thinking “this isn’t fair” but it doesn’t change a damn thing. Life isn’t fair.

“So what do I do? Suck it up, roll over and play dead, be pussy whipped?”  Nope. Wouldn’t suggest that for a minute. We all hate it when we roll over and play dead, we all hate the way it makes us feel impotent and useless when we seemingly cave to our partner’s  (and I hate to use the word) unfair behavior. We resent rolling over and after a while that resentment builds up into a general dislike and distrust for our spouses and bingo, the marriage has taken the exit ramp to the Twilight Zone.

“BUT she’s being irrational… you said so yourself… why should I have to put up with someone who’s being irrational?” Jeezopete, come on down off the cross. We all act irrational from time to time, and your typical response, to feel attacked and to become defensive is not only irrational, but it is ineffective. It is time to try something new, something that works.

You stand up for yourself by embracing the anger. If you haven’t the foggiest what I mean by that you haven’t read enough of the blog or the book, but it comes down to this: you don’t walk away, but you do realize that this isn’t about the door being left open.

Always and Never are invitations to dialogue. Always and Never are by themselves statements of a fear that life is not going to change. This is what I am going to live with the rest of my life. He is never going to change. I am always going to be miserable.

The key is to engage your beloved through dialogue and mirroring to understand what is going on in her life.

So your response might better be: “You’re right. I did leave the door open. Did I get that right?” and then let her explain if there is more. If there is, go there, but if there’s not you simply say “I can understand how finding the door would make you ….

And before you know it your relationship will grow deeper and more meaningful and there is a damn fine chance that you wife will stop saying “you always….”

Now if this makes no sense to you what so ever it’s because this is your first time here and you have neither read the book nor are you up to speed, but trust me on this and read on.

In the interim, it wouldn’t do yourself or your relationships with your spouse and kids if you took “never” and “always” out of your lexicon as well.