Sleight of Tongue and Relationships

Well I am at it (again) things really have become more fun here, but also more challenging, it seems all of the work in college is due at the same time, go figure. Well here's what I really need to say about what's happened, because this is not a blog of events, just for thoughts and the like.

Someone I know used a very good trick to get out of a situation that should never have occured and that trick is something I would call slight of hand, its like saying something that is so hard to really pin down as meaning one thing that you leave it open to interpertation. There's plenty of ways of doing this and all of them are devious in their own right.

Say you're talking to a person and you tell them "hey I want to be with you," well this can be taken to mean two totally different things, with a whole sliding range of emotional niches that someone could fall into. It could be hey I want to be with you as far as dating goes, or hey I just want to hang out sometime, or even worse hey I want to just sleep with you.

Well say that the person saying this means it in the second way presented, hey I want to hang out with you. Well what if the receptor of the message hears it as hey I want to sleep with you? What will they think? How will they react? Well both of these warrant completely different reactions either way.

Now what if they think that the person saying this meant hey I want to date you? They might become excited, or even upset and not want to talk to you again. It could become a real problem. Now I know that because of nonverbal communication that its hard to make this mistake, but the real thing is that its hard to catergorize someone's non-verbal communication. Its even harder to record or demonstrate that you know someone meant this becasuse of the way they acted.

You can tell a girl these things in the most sensitive voice ever, touch their hand slightly, and even make really devouted eye contact with them, but if they don't know you and this is just how you are, you could mean that you want to hang out with them. And even worse you can doctor body language, speech patterns and eye contact to say one thing while you mean something else.

The particualr exampe that happened here all relied on the word relationship, now while this may be a simple word that we all know, love, use and understand; it is also a basis for all human interaction. Every human in the world is related to every other in some way, even if they don't ever directly interact, everything you do is part of a whole, related to a whole and thus is part of one global relationship.

It's the No Man is an Island and Six Degress of Seperation all over again people!

For the example I will give of what happened we will use relationship (in italics) only if we're referring to a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. The word relationship (in bold) will refer to a broad use of the term, as to mean that there is no real clear definition. Here's how the conversation would look between P1 and P2...

P2: I really like you.

P1: Yeah you're pretty cool too.

P2: Its good that we met, but where is this going?

P1: I want a relationship.

P2: I would like to have a relationship too.

P1: Well its nice to see that we'd both like to have the same thing. (the relationship)

P2: Yeah it is. (the relationship)

See how person 2 just manuvered person 1 into a place where they could be easily manipulated? They didn't describe what relationship meant to either of them, I mean you could replace relationship with friendship and it would still be the same conversation with a totally different meaning, you could replace it with alot of other types of things and it would still look nearly the same with a totally different meanting and undertone.

Basically what I mean to say here is make sure that before anything happens that you are clear on what is meant when people say something, its a very sneaky tactic that is used by people sometimes to say words that mean so many things and then back out of it by saying that the meaning was misunderstood. So you have to be sure of what you get into.

See ya....