on technique

It’s interesting how we fight. It’s not necessarily the overt act of arguing, per se, but how we battle with one another on a psychological level. Thankfully, I haven’t had too much of this going on as of late. But I’ve witnessed a good bit, as a woman happily perched on the perimeter, loving her place in the sun while the others fight it out in the darkened trenches.

It isn’t just the women in my life, so the men shouldn’t sigh with complete relief. The women I know tend to wear the world on their sleeves, a tacky holiday vest of wrongdoings and slights. Yes, they – we? – often see ourselves as victims. The ones undermined by coworkers. Ignored by whomever. Forgotten by those who didn’t matter just the day before. But should archaeologists dig our brains up 2,000 years from now, and somehow find a way to gauge just how it is that we approached human conflict, I am sure that, just as with the spine and the jawbone and the femur, they would find little variation between us. Subtle ones, not necessarily by gender, to be sure, but I picture these descendents able to lay our bones and someday our white matter into distinct and sterile groupings. Tagged in bold Sharpie, simply by approach.

There are the reactive of us for whom every disagreement is the end. The end of the dinner, the end of an otherwise rewarding vacation, the end of the relationship. An action or an ill-phrased comment turns into ample cause to terminate what has taken months or years to create. Explosive emotion invariably trumps history. The stakes in every interaction are sky high. The simplest of snubs becomes cause to recruit the others, to enlist the aid of those uninvolved, to hear of the atrocities and the unfairness perpetrated. Years of investment crumble in an instant.

Some of us horde the negative like a lone soldier preparing for battle, a veritable arsenal of misunderstandings and perceived abuse, never before addressed. Why should they be? The sum of the transgressions is clearly more substantial and useful than each alone. Everything seems fine; day to day the world turns just as you think it always will. But in the background he picks up each offense, adding it to the bucket of wrongdoing. And you don’t even know it exists until filled to the rim, when things become too much for him to bear. Suddenly you’re dodging bullets seven years in the making that have grown in weight over time. Mountains aren’t just molehills. These are the volcanic eruptions of our relationships.

There are those of us who take every opportunity to push buttons. To act initially as a shoulder to cry on, a confidante with whom one may share every confession. He didn’t want me. They found out I wasn’t the person they thought I was. And in flashes of conflict with those who know your every vulnerability, when you are most susceptible, they hurl them back at you. And the onslaught is infinitely more powerful and more hurtful than were the moments of confession. Sadly, there seems to be sick pleasure taken in their ability to wield your every acknowledgement as a weapon. And no matter what, no matter how genuinely the comforting shoulder is offered again, things can not even be made the same.

And there are those of us who ignore. For whom nothing is wrong and all is fine. Avoided at all costs, confrontation is the STD of the interpersonal interaction. You poke and you prod and you try to engage them in a healthy discussion, but they remain mute and go about the days, Seinfeld on reruns and conflict on the backburner. It’s pervasive. They do it with you, with their bosses, their mothers, the neighbor who daily makes off with their Washington Post. It’s fine that they got fries instead of greens, that a friend chose a better option despite established plans. Implosion seems inevitable, although it never comes. You’re quite sure it would for you.

I wonder if we even recognize that one or more of these are part of us.