demystifying clarity
A huge part of clarity that goes undiscussed most of the time is the need for a shared language. It’s easy to equate clarity to honesty, but they’re not the same thing. I have been honest, sometimes brutally so in my relationships, but it wasn’t until I met someone who had shared language with me around my core values that I really began to flourish. It’s important for us to be aware of this, and I wish I had paid more attention to this need earlier on, making sure we were understanding things in the same way, sharing a couple culture that set shared expectations for not only conduct but language. Instead, I spent countless hours with past partners explaining and re-explaining why I was in a bad mood, why my bad mood mattered, why I felt uncomfortable in said partner’s friend group, etc. I had to keep justifying myself anew.
A concrete example is discussed at length in a previous chapter: love. We can define love in a number of ways, but it’s important that I and my partner have a shared understanding of what love ultimately means for us. I remember one of my previous partners insisted that to be in love was meant to be easy, smooth sailing, largely without negative emotions involved, and that if we were experiencing a lot of negative emotions then we weren’t supposed to be together. To him, that was love. Obviously, I disagreed. But no one comes into a conversation defining every term so that there’s a shared understanding. There are certain expectations that we expect follow certain words. For example, we all have a pretty clear idea of what “right” and “wrong” means, and therefore we can have productive conversations with others concerning matters of right and wrong. In relationships, setting expectations becomes a minefield for misunderstanding, and it is probably our greatest challenge to build an integrated relational lexicon that enables healthy conversations and character growth. This can happen naturally, as it did with me and Kyle, or it can be built, even from scratch. The important thing is that we recognize that we cannot even talk to each other in any meaningful way until we establish what it is we’re talking about.
There are tons of tools out there that are easy ways for people to develop shared languages. One might call this an education. I find the term fitting: the people I went to school with at Columbia in New York talk very differently and experience the world very different from Kyle’s UVA classmates; Korean people have a shared cultural script, like standing when someone older walks into a room or looking at the ground when shaking someone’s hand, that other ethnic communities do not share. We can get an education in any of these cultures, and we can also get a tailored education in the culture of our significant other. I’ve learned that Kyle has some culturally Korean behavioral languages, that he speaks about emotions using EHS language, that he follows the script of both evangelicalism and social activism, and I’m nowhere close to fully understanding him.
With so many different things to define and so many expectations to communicate around all of the different axis of our identities, the only surefire way to approach deep relationship is with humility. It’s to see someone and not assume that you know everything about them and to take joy in discovering new things about them, to not pass judgements on their scripts and languages but to seek understanding. It is similar to the ways that God seeks to know us and the way that we should seek to know God.
