Constructive Arguing

I’ve been married for fifteen years to a very stubborn man, and we’re still married. We get into arguments, and sometimes we get into big arguments. Although I’d like to tell you I’m always right, that’s not the case. But our arguments don’t last longer than an hour, and this list is what I credit to it. (The sources are Irving Gottman’s works and a few other things that have circulated around the internet enough that they are without attribution. If someone can find attribution, I will add.)

Here are the rules we argue by:

Soft startup. This is one of Gottman’s best contributions. It means “Don’t start arguments with jabbing your finger into the other person’s chest and demanding that they fix their problem.” I have been guilty of starting arguments by jabbing my finger in the other person’s chest for years.
I statements. This helps us own the problem. The formula is “I feel x when you do y.” “Feel” should be an emotion and not “like you are wrong”.
Finding the truth in the other person’s statements. It seems like manipulation, but it’s really a way of defusing the situation while letting the other person know they’re valid.

Anyone can use these tools. They don’t work instantly, but they can shorten the length and reduce the severity of an argument. It helps if both parties know the skills, but one person can use these with great effectiveness. I highly recommend this method of arguing, as it helps us to communicate to get their needs met, which causes an argument.

Josh and Jeanne Part 2: An interesting conversation

I finally had the guts to write this as I wanted to — with a role reversal: Josh knows what he wants; Jeanne is uncertain, and they have a tense time of it.
****

The next afternoon, Jeanne heard the doorbell ring. She saw Josh through the peephole and opened the door.

“Can I come in? I need to talk this time.” Josh stood there, dressed neatly in a jacket over a red sweater and jeans.

“Sure.” Jeanne opened the door, not knowing what to expect.

Josh took a deep breath and said, “I need to talk about something.”

Jeanne opened the door. “Yes?” Jeanne felt her shoulders tense, as he had said that twice.

“You keep running away from me,” he rushed in, stripping off his unbuttoned black jacket and laying it on the couch, as if gearing up for a fist fight. “First the summer, then this semester. I’m asking you as your friend, since you don’t see me as boyfriend material – “

“It’s not that I don’t see you as boyfriend material,” Jeanne rejoined before the words could be retracted. “It’s just that – that – “

“You don’t trust me.” Josh countered. “You didn’t want to tell me about what was bothering you.”

“I don’t have to tell you what’s bothering me, Josh,” Jeanne snapped. Did she? Should she have? As his friend?

“If something’s bothering you — even it it’s me — I would rather know,” Josh challenged.

Jeanne had never seen Josh confront her, or anyone, before. Begrudgingly she admitted it became him.“It’s not even that I don’t trust you. It’s that you’re so damn young.” Jeanne rubbed her forehead.

“I’m not as young as you think,” Josh said, in a firm, calm voice that made Jeanne catch her breath.
“Jeanne, I’m legal to drink. I’m legal to fight in a war. I’ve been legal to vote for 2 years, at the age of consent in Illinois for 3 years. I am not and never have been your student; I am not related to you. I’m old enough to make my own choices. To be your friend is one of my choices that you don’t get to make for me. I spend time with my friends, I share with my friends. I love my friends. You will not take that away from me.”

“But you don’t want to just be friends,” Jeanne countered. “You’re in love with me.” There, she said it. She had named the elephant in the room. “And I don’t think you’re above manipulation to get me to love you back.”

“Manipulation? To get you to fall — “ Josh paused. “I don’t see it that way, but —”

“Those big brown eyes,” Jeanne’s eyes flashed.

“What,” Josh stammered as he subconsciously dropped into an aikido pose. “What the — “ Josh paused, and Jeanne felt the silence, then: “I may just be guilty of that. I discovered my teachers would be more sympathetic when I acted cute, and maybe then they would tell the others to lay off me. I could, and can, manipulate. But if you catch me doing that, tell me.”

“You’ve pursued me for several months. Is that manipulation?” Jeanne glanced into those big brown eyes.

“I don’t know. I practice aikido, and the philosophy of that is to bridge the distance between yourself and the opponent until there’s no distance. The best aikido practitioner never has to fight. I’m guilty of wanting to bridge that distance, but aikido allows for the distance to be bridged in the way that best suits the two.”

“Are we opponents now?” Jeanne snorted.

“We never were. The principles still hold. The goal is win-win,” he smiled. Charmingly.

Jeanne simultaneously wanted to shake him and kiss him.“What do you want? To get me back into bed?”

“Everything, Jeanne. I want everything.” Jeanne’s stomach flipped. He was only twenty-one, and he wanted everything with her.

“You’re too — “ Jeanne stopped herself. She couldn’t tell if Josh was too young anymore, given how the conversation had turned. “What if I can’t give you everything?” Jeanne challenged.

“Why not?!” Josh groaned.

“Maybe I love you enough that I would let you go if that’s what you needed.” Jeanne heard the words, wasn’t sure she meant them.

“What if I don’t want you to let me go?” Josh sounded bewildered.

“I said need. Remember how you thought I needed you to come over to see whether I felt okay?” Jeanne said quietly, so quietly it was almost a whisper .

“Yes.”

“I think you need experience to compare me with. Relationship experience. Sexual experience. The kind of experience you’d get if you didn’t always spend time with me.” Jeanne hated the words as she said them.

“I think you overestimate my ability to get a girlfriend,” Josh replied dryly.

“I don’t think so. Unless women have gotten stupider with time.” Jeanne gritted her teeth.

“Will I still get to be your friend?” Josh pushed his hair back.

“Yes,” Jeanne raised her eyebrows.

“Will I get to spend time around you?” Josh quirked one eyebrow, looking rather like a cute puppy.

“Yes.” Jeanne committed. “I’ll let you decide if you need to go. Just let me decide if I need to go.”

“That is all I can ask, milady.” Josh took her hand in his, kissed it, and let himself out of Jeanne’s house.

Josh left, and Jeanne sat down heavily on her favorite chair. She put her head in her hands. She thought about forever with Josh, and no matter how ludicrous it seemed, she could see the possibility. Even if he was too young, or she was too old. If he wanted her, she couldn’t be too old, could she? But her prosaic fear of abandonment had been joined by a more pressing fear — that the threats against her, vague as they were, would involve him in their scope.

An excerpt!

This is an excerpt from “Toppled”, my current project. I skipped ahead to something I thought would be more motivating for me. Ichirou and Grace and Greg have “talents” — strange abilities hidden under the mundane talents they have as prodigies. This gets into talents ethics, and — well, bumbling attempts at relationships. This is from Ichirou’s point of view — he spent several years in a school that tries to cure hikikomoris, or teenage recluses. Grace’s parents put her in residential music schools for most of her life, and she has little parenting as a result. Greg’s family was killed in a bombing about 13 years ago.

Because this is an excerpt from the middle of the book, you may have some questions. Go ahead and ask!

**************

I sat in the copse of trees that the cabin nestled in. I focused on the birds singing to keep the pressure of the air from crushing me. Ayana-sensei taught me how to do that, to keep me from retreating into what she called my own mind. I didn’t correct her – I retreated to a place, not my own mind.

And now I would tell Grace-chan – Gracie in her language — about this place, and she would doubtless think I was crazy. But I would not be an impostor to her.

I glanced up, and I saw Gracie stroll toward me, tall and lean and poised. She had the perfect demeanor, the perfect body – I stopped the thought there by thinking of the birds, some of which sounded familiar, some not. One bird called “cheer, cheer, cheer!” and I knew I had once heard it in the world I retreated to.

Gracie wore shorts and a t-shirt and a black baseball cap with a white symbol that, after much scrutiny, I realized were initials intertwined. The Yankees, of course. She sat down next to me, unnervingly close, and I smelled a distinctly chemical, un-Gracie smell. She handed me a bottle. “Good. You have a hat. Rub some of this on so the ticks don’t get you.” I did as directed, and I too smelled like cleaning fluid disguised by artificial flower scent.

“So why are we here?” she asked, cocking her head as she peered at me.

“It’s time to tell you something.”

Of course, Gracie’s brow wrinkled at my dramatic choice of words. “Time to tell me what?”

“Where my talent comes from.”

“Comes from?” Gracie would say that, because her talent, or the talent beneath her talent, developed from her childhood need to be listened to and appeared to come from her own subconscious.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I felt the slight breeze pushing against my skin. “Your talent comes from something inside you. My talent comes from a place outside of me.”

“What do you mean?” Grace-chan stammered.

“Do you remember the video I showed you the day we met?”

“I can’t forget that –” she snapped. “I spent half an hour with you in a pitch-black lounge watching bunnies turn into flowers and finding all the pain of my childhood – which had no bunnies or flowers – lying dissected in front of me.”

“I miscalculated,” I shrugged. “Too much happy and not enough comforting.” I paused. “But that’s not the point.”

“Not the point,” Gracie echoed.

“The reason I wanted to meet here is because I wanted you to know where my ideas come from.”

“They come from your mind?” Gracie asked, and I couldn’t identify her tone of voice.

“No, Gracie,” I corrected. “There’s this place, and I go there – “

“And the place is in your mind,” she insisted.

“No. I go someplace. Someplace else. When I was a hikikomori, the world would become too much for me to deal with, and I would go to this other place with no sound but pictures flowing like waterfalls, and it would tell me stories in pictures, and I started to retell them. Sometimes it showed me horrible stories that I swore I would never share. But most of the pictures show me things the world needs to see. And I retell them.”

“And you’ve assigned yourself as the arbiter of what people need to see. How conceited of you!” Without another word, she stood up and stalked off.

I sat with my back against my tree and my eyes closed, trying to pay attention to the sounds rather than going back to my world.

“Ichirou, let me give you a piece of advice.” I opened my eyes, and Greg, lanky and unkempt in his second-hand fatigues, squatted next to me. “When dealing with women, it’s best not to dismiss their emotions lest they get angry and stomp away in a huff.”