The Fantasy of Wordless Communication

⊕ PSYCHOLOGY | SOCIETY

The Fantasy of Wordless Communication

One of the most gratifying aspects of the early days of a relationship is the sense that our lover has been equipped with an extraordinary capacity to understand us intuitively – without us needing to explain ourselves in detail.

27.03.2017

One of the most gratifying aspects of the early days of a relationship is the sense that our lover has been equipped with an extraordinary capacity to understand us intuitively – without us needing to explain ourselves in detail.

With other people, we are frequently mired in a requirement to construct pedantic tortuous explanations to convey our intentions – but a true lover seems to get us almost immediately, even in the finer-grained aspects of our personalities. No sooner have we tried to explain, for example, our feelings towards autumn evenings or a passage in a song we are especially touched by (when the violins start to rise against a deepening bass) that they generously step in to say, ‘I know, I know…’, seemingly ready to confirm our every sensation and idea.

This is a profoundly beautiful and exciting discovery. However, it is also one which gives rise to an impression with hugely dangerous consequences for the long-term success of our relationships: the belief that a true lover should and could invariably understand everything about us without us having to speak.
The belief is, over time, responsible for a catalogue of ills, most prominent of which is a catastrophic tendency to lapse into sulking.

Sulking is a highly distinctive phenomenon within the psychology of love.

Crucially, we don’t just sulk with anyone. We reserve our sulks for people we believe should understand us but happen on a given occasion not to. We could explain what is wrong to them of course, but if we did so, it would mean that they had failed to understand us intuitively and therefore, that they were not worthy of love. People who may have been uncomplainingly articulate all day with colleagues at the office, with small children or relatives will, over an apparently minor misunderstanding with a partner, suddenly become obstinate and furiously uncommunicative, because these characters, of all people, should just know. A sulk is a sign of deep hope. One would never bother to storm out of a room, bang the door and refuse to say what was wrong for a few hours unless one held out very high hopes of a person. We don’t fall into sulks with most people because we have so little hope that they could ever understand. A sulk is one of the odder gifts of love.

The fateful hope reveals a debt to earliest childhood. In the womb, we never had to explain what we needed. Food and comfort simply came. If we had the privilege of being well parented, some of that idyll may have continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every need known: someone guessed for us. They saw through our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations when we didn’t have the ability to verbalise. That was the greatest kindness. It was an effort of love. Then came the struggle to learn to speak, driven in part by the failure of others to understand us well enough. Language is born from a degree of disappointment. Eloquence is a sign of how misunderstood we have felt in danger of being, of how badly we needed to be persuasive. But it is also why eloquence is an asset we may be highly unwilling to call upon in love. The most articulate among us may simply not want to explain ourselves within what should be the protective realm of a relationship.

In a more helpful culture than our own, we would be reminded that our partners may be very nice and at the same time very likely to misunderstand, without evil intent, a good number of our moods. Even at their best, they will be mistaken in their interpretations of a raft of our central needs. To calm us down in the midst of a sulk, we should be reminded that it is not really a sign of love for every aspect of our souls to be grasped wordlessly. It is no insult to us to be called upon to develop our eloquence. When our lovers fail to understand, it isn’t an immediate sign that they are heartless. It may merely be that, out of a Romantic prejudice, we have grown a little too committed to not teaching them about who we are.

In an ideal world, we would also more readily recognise (when we can manage a compassionate mood) the comic aspect of sulking – even when we are the special target of the sulker’s fury and rage. We would see the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and employed by a major law firm, but they are in fact saying: “Deep inside, I remain an infant and right now, I need you to be my parent. I need you to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were formed.”

The sulk can be overcome when this insane, touching ambition reveals its comedic dimension. We are then in a position to laugh, not because we don’t care, but because we understand how touching our fantasies of one another are. We are so alive to the notion of being patronised when considered as younger than we are; we forget that this is also, at times, the greatest privilege. We look beyond the sulker’s callous words and the slammed door. We grasp the real suffering beneath the horrible exterior, we see that our adversary is hurt not mean, and are struck – once more – by how oddly human nature is arranged. But because we understand, we are no longer frightened or angry in turn. The furious, hopeful, deluded absurdity of our partner’s trouble makes us gently smile. We get ready to knock at the door and gently ask if they might let us in for a word.

Part of becoming mature must be to believe that we cannot fairly continue to expect others to read our minds if we have not previously deigned to lay out their contents through the admittedly very cumbersome medium of words. Even the most intelligent, sensitive lover cannot be expected to continue to navigate around us without a lot of patiently articulated verbal indications of our desires and intentions. Those charming early lucky guesses about what our lovers feel should not fool us too long. Even in a very successful relationship, there is only a tiny amount that a lover should ever be expected to know of their beloved without it having been explained in language. We shouldn’t get furious when our lovers don’t guess right. Rather than bolting our mouths and retreating into the comforting silence of a sulk, we should have the courage – always – to try to explain.

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⊕ PSYCHOLOGY | SOCIETY