Volume control

KOCHI: Think of your favourite music. It might be a classical tune, or some song from the ‘60s or the latest hit song, or even some heavy metal, punk rock. Whatever your choice of music might be, just notice how much you enjoy it, and at what volume. Can you still feel joy in it if it is blasting at a ridiculously high volume, or if it is being played non-stop? At some point, even the most melodious tune becomes just noise. We would shut it down, relegated it to background noise, tuning it out and developing selective deafness, or just walk away.

Is it the same when we want to communicate with each other? When we want our partners to listen and think they aren’t listening, do we find ourselves saying what we need to say more and more often, louder and in shriller tones? Does that work?

More often than not, all it does is get us a reputation as a nag, and people just don’t listen. Communication tends to break down and fall apart. What’s worse, the focus shifts from who we are and what we are trying to achieve, to only the How of it. We get labelled as the shrill one, the loud one, the nag - no matter how important the content of what we were trying to say. We might be saying really important things, useful and healthful things, we might have been the most hard working, conscientious person around, but all that gets washed away with only the How of our communication remaining.

In relationships, we often hear that complaint where one person, frustrated to the point of tears, says, “I do so much, take care of everything, and yet, I just get labelled as the angry one, the loud one.” Relationships are frustrating. When we get tagged as the bag or the loud or shrill one, people tend to tune out not only the thing we are harping on, but over time, to everything we say. The danger is that it will colour everything, like that one hand-dyed red shirt that colours the whole laundry into a shade of pink.

If we don’t have better tools to work through the frustrating parts of the relationship, even the parts of the relationship that are great start to feel not-so-great. To extend the laundry metaphor, the parts of the relationship that are frustrating and painful can’t be banged away with the rest of it. We need to separate it out, handle it directly and carefully. Maybe even leave it as is for dry-cleaning and not wash it at all. 

Learning to separate out one tricky bit from the big muddle of interpersonal issues, bringing focused attention to it and not letting it colour everything, takes a lot of effort, mutual respect and willingness to deal with it. Sometimes, it might still not work. The partner might just be in a “Take it, or leave it,” space, and we need to choose whether and how we can live with something we just don’t like at all.