Posted 3 years, 10 months ago in the early afternoon by oso
My grandmother is fond of reminding me that each person has a fight or flight reaction to conflict. Some immediately want to get it all out in the air. They don’t mind the yelling and screaming and name calling so long as a conflict is dealt with as soon as it comes up. Then there’s the flight reaction: avoiding conflict at all cost. “Let’s just talk about this later.” Or, “I don’t understand what the big deal is, let’s just get over it.” Or maybe not even that; maybe just turning your back and walking away.
It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am of the second breed. I don’t fight, I fly. I’m trying to work on it. I’m trying to deal with conflicts as they come up, but I have little patience for - what often feels like - arguing for the sake of arguing.
Something that my grandmother never did tell me is that there are people - many people - who actually enjoy conflict and arguing. I am discovering this more and more and I am trying to understand it better because it is obviously something that is not going to go away.
So far, my theory is that it’s not the actual arguing these people are interested in, but what inevitably follows. The making up. Or as behavioral primatologist Frans de Waal calls it, reconciliation.
In many relationships (romantic, friendships, family), there is a passive, easy going, stoic person who goes through life without many emotional ups and downs. They’re often referred to as “type B’s.” Then there is the more emotional, driven, talkative, and impatient type who is the “type A.” The stereotype is that more women are type A’s while more men are type B’s, but it’s also often the other way around.
(Type A’s and type B’s seem to be attracted to each other. Must think about why.)
Anyway, my theory goes that the type A person starts getting fed up of with the stoic, inexpressive character of the type B person and wants to experience an emotional exchange, but doesn’t know how to make that happen. Come to think about it, I think those emotional exchanges are really what we live for in life. Those moments when a conversation lasts 4 hours, but you’re so lost in it that you don’t even realize how much time has gone by. Or if you’re a musician and your jamming with some friends and all of a sudden it starts to all come together. Or you’re on the basketball court and your team is playing like finely tuned machinery. Or you are overcome with desire for someone and you want nothing more than to mesh into one person, to make love for hours, days, weeks, forever. Even writing on a blog … if it feels like it’s really flowing and that it will make an impact on someone reading it (especially if they comment saying so), that too is an emotional exchange.
But how do you sustain those moments? And especially in a relationship. It’s so easy for us to take each other for granted. Sometimes we get drunk or do drugs and go dancing … that can do the trick temporarily, but it feels fake and it doesn’t satisfy the emotional need like the real thing.
So I think that some people, when they feel their relationship or friendship has been lacking in these emotional exchanges, they (subconsciously) seek out an argument because they know it will inevitably lead to reconciliation, which is an emotional exchange. Or as I often overhear groups of women saying in the cafe I work at, “make up sex is soooo good.”
But for whatever reason, I don’t have the same reaction as everyone else. After reconciliation I don’t’ want sex or cuddling or even talking. I want to be by myself. I feel introverted and reflective, trying to figure out what the hell happened, what was that whole argument about anyway?
I guess I am still learning how to argue.
Anyway, I just finished my second book of the year, a collection of short stories by Dave Eggers called How We Are Hungry. This story is entitled She Waits, Seething, Blooming:
She is a single mother and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching Elimidate, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious - which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak - that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.
How We Are Hungry, I realized, is the first piece of fiction I’ve read in quite a while. It’s also the book I’ve most enjoyed in a long long time. Eggers has an incredible talent describing those unsaid thoughts that just barely skim on the surface of our consciousness. I can relate to every line he writes; even where he places his comments, the way his mind speaks. I wonder if this is how some people feel when they read Sheakspeare? (a homeboy I really don’t relate well to at all) Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will always be one of my favorites because when I read it, his intense, cynical, emotional, and sloppy logorrhea couldn’t have been more appealing. But with You Shall Know Our Velocity and now How We Are Hungry, I respect how he’s making his work tighter, more selective, more subtle, and what some would call more “literary.”
If you check out How We Are Hungry, The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water and Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance were two of my favorites. On page 201 there is a six page story called There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself which consists of six blank pages. That’s something I can relate to. Often it is what I’m most tempted to write about on here that I should really just keep to myself.
Whoa, dood, we’re on some freaky same wavelength here. I never heard of Frans de Waal until I listened to his speech on primates at the PopTech conference while doing some housework on Saturday - more speeches here. He’s funny and has good stage presence for an academic. I had a good time reusing his material at a house party Saturday night, comparing the little children there to chimps to great effect.
And I’m a huge Jared Diamond fan too! I feel a San Diego politics/web dork book club coming on…
Good entry, Oso.
‘It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am of the second breed. I don’t fight, I fly. I’m trying to work on it. I’m trying to deal with conflicts as they come up, but I have little patience for - what often feels like - arguing for the sake of arguing’.
–Oso
I am a fighter, but I try to choose my battles. Keyword is try.
My advice to you? Never, ever, ever marry a lawyer….they live for the sake of argument.
But how do you sustain those moments? And especially in a relationship. It’s so easy for us to take each other for granted. Sometimes we get drunk or do drugs and go dancing … that can do the trick temporarily, but it feels fake and it doesn’t satisfy the emotional need like the real thing.
–Oso
I suppose you can sustain those moments by visiting a coffee shop and thinking of conversational topics? Such as……..asking your friend/lover questions like:
“What are your dreams and aspirations”?
“How do you feel about this situation”?
“What do you live and breathe for in life”?
You know………the thought provoking questions.
Dancing is good because it is a method of good cardio exercise. It gets your endorphins going.
Al,
I thought I first heard of Frans De Waal through IT Conversations as well. But then after looking around a little bit, I found out that he wrote The Ape and the Sushi Master, which I read a few chapters of while waiting for a friend to get ready for a party. I remember thinking to myself, I must find this book and finish reading it. I never did, but I’m looking for it again now.
I know I would never follow through on an actual book club, but I do want to start keeping a booklog on my sidebar so that people know what books I’m reading and I’d like to know what they’re reading. Obviously, we like reading a lot of the same stuff … so if I see you recommend a book, I’d be all over it.
DD,
I don’t know how I’m going to survive with all my friends becoming lawyers. Already, all their arguments start with, “you have to think about it from a legal perspective.”
Yeah, whatever.
Anyway, I think you’re right. Going to cafes is key. Sometimes you have to really remind yourself to really ask how the other person has been feeling. To dig deeper. I’m a big fan of taking walks to. For some reason, conversation flows easier for me while I’m walking. (actually, I’ve got a theory as to why.)
For me, the real challenge is making the time and knowing where to prioritize, where to invest my time. In all truth, I should probably be spending less time typing in this little box and more walking on the beach with those I care about.
Oso, what an excellent idea! So I stole it and slapped up two lists in my blog sidebar - “books I’ve read” and “books I’m reading” - courtesy of del.icio.us and rssdigest. Well, the “books I’ve read” isn’t behaving nicely, but you get the idea.
Hooray for the Web 2.0, that took like five minutes max. Yeah, it’s not ground-breaking, Typepad and other blog software already offer this stuff, but it was easy and quick, which is what I’m addicted to these days: simple things to experiment with that don’t ask for big changes in my workflow. The del.icio.us/rssdigest combo has allowed me to extend my plain vanilla blogger templates in a really fun way.
Enough geekery about the tools, back to the meat: I’d love to noodle with your book stack too, so jump on that whenever you can. And I noticed some good pickings in your musical taste. I’m thinking movies and tv shows might be ripe for this too, although I watch very little tv.
I hate when people, like you, recommend books that I don’t have time (or make time) to read. It makes me feel sad. And by the way, I didn’t start actually engaging in conflict until I got older. Conflict was usually with my parents and I always left that to my older brother because he was really good at it.
That’s a great book … I have it in my collection.
… which reminds me, I have psych to catch up on…
To this post, I say, “Amen, hallelujah, and all those other fun things that go on in the choir!”
Peace … and all that happy hippie stuff.
BTW, I’m very impressed that I can translate this blog into Romantic languages, that’s pretty cool.
However … I’m waiting on Hebrew and Cyrillic.
I’ve always felt that there’s a third, overriding emotion that most people actually choose - fright. Deer in the Headlights. From personal experience, the overriding emotion in a stressful situation is Do Nothing. Freeze. And then shove your head the sand, ala that grandiose grotesque of darwinian humour, the Ostrich. When asked what emotion has most shaped human history, I side with Dostoyevski - Shame. Sel-Pity. That deleterious urge to consciously fuck yourself royally.
I try with Eggers, I really do, but I just can’t get past something in his style, something that I’ve tried defining a hundred different ways but it’s still eluding me, still riding the edge of a subjective I Just Don’t Like the Guy’s Writing subjectivity. Maybe logorrhea is a great term to describe it - the overdose of verbiage when just a simple phrase would do - or maybe it’s his knowitallity (speaking of off the cuff terminology) that gets me, like to use the phrase ‘that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known.’ is to assume, in literary terms, the ability to crawl inside of someone else’s mind, something that I don’t feel one should ever attempt, not even involving the mind of a purely fictional character. I find doing that to be pretentious, and just plain rude. But maybe that’s just me…
Jon: that’s Fredkin’s Paradox kicking your ass in that situation. When it’s hard to decide between two things, you can end up doing neither, even though it probably doesn’t matter which one you pick, which makes you hesitate even more, which adds even more urgency and clouds the thinking, which makes you hestitate even more, etc etc, vicious cycle. That’s why deer freeze - they’d run if they knew which way to go, but the lights in the eyes hide which direction the car is going, so all options are a draw.
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Words/f.html#FREDKINS_PARADOX
I don’t know how I’m going to survive with all my friends becoming lawyers. Already, all their arguments start with, “you have to think about it from a legal perspective.”
Yeah, whatever.
–Oso
The one the I like is, “What would a reasonable person do in the given situation”?
–DD
For me, the real challenge is making the time and knowing where to prioritize, where to invest my time.
–Oso
Yes, prioritization is key. Delegating is key. Balance is key……and then of course you have to set aside some personal thinking time.
I like what you did with your website. It is more “reader” friendly.