Say what you need to... but not more.
Some hard conversations should probably never be had.
One of my worst fears is being stuck in a relationship where authentic speech is punished, which I have written about in a previous article. If you cannot say what is on your mind out of fear for the other person’s reaction, you cannot solve the problems you see and you cannot assert your boundaries for self-preservation. So, is the solution to just say what you want to say? Not quite.
Zero self-censorship
What it means to be reasonable
By nature, there is really no conversation I am not willing to entertain. I cannot remember the last time I rejected someone’s bid to talk about anything, and I cannot remember if I have ever prematurely stopped talking to someone because the subject matter itself frustrated me too much to continue talking about it. Playing with ideas is fun. It’s fun to explore a landscape of things I hadn’t thought about before and to hear how other people walk through it. You’ll never hear me say something is “not that deep” or to “just stop thinking about it” or even just “nevermind”: I want to play.
When someone disagrees with me, it doesn’t offend me. It saddens me that the opposite is quite common: even when I agree with someone but play devil’s advocate for our mutual position, they get offended because they see an attack on the idea as an attack on themselves. I don’t really understand getting frustrated about hypotheticals, but I assume it must be an intelligence thing. In any case, to me, this is the fun in conversation: making an argument as airtight as possible, even if we have to consider supposedly offensive alternatives to do so. This is how I used to study in university, with great results as consequence: read the textbook, construct a mental model, and then wield the textbook to attack my mental model from every angle possible, until it could withstand it.
Lastly: I want to solve problems when I know they exist, or, if there is no solution, at least find the most optimal approach to the problem. It makes absolutely no sense to me when talking about a particular problem is just off the table to someone, either as a conscious refusal, or because they get so heated that they are impossible to be reasoned with.
Emotional safety
One of my female acquaintances once told me that emotional safety was among her top three qualities she looked for in a man. What she meant by it was that her emotions would not be glossed over, would not be dismissed as baseless, and would instead be attended to by comforting her. She definitely wouldn’t have liked who I was around the time I left high school, back when I left no room for feelings when those feelings originated in an incorrect interpretation of things. (After all, I am right here telling you that your feelings are baseless, so you can just stop feeling them now, right?) I have since adopted the view that “feelings are never wrong”. What caused them might be all kinds of severely misguided, but the feelings themselves are a somewhat involuntary reaction of the animal hardware onto which humans were built by nature.
Of course, it is incumbent upon an adult to not let themselves be engulfed by emotions. The emotional safety I personally look for has more to do with this, rather than what my acquaintance said: I don’t really care about how my emotions are attended to (if they are based on me being misguided, tell me as soon as possible so I can dismiss them myself), but instead, what I care about is not being punished in some way for bringing up a topic which I feel is important to talk about. So, whereas a woman might desire someone who coddles her emotions, I desire a woman who keeps her emotions in check (and I will coddle the remainder) and moreover does not withdraw her affection based on the mere act of putting a certain subject on the table to be discussed. Unfortunately, as any man will tell you, this is rare.
So, my base view is that no conversation should be off-limits. If I want to talk about something, I should be able to fully put my case in front of my significant other, and I should be able to fully hear out her case on the matter.
Why do you fear conflict?
For those who self-censor, it is actually an interesting exercise to think what it is that you fear will happen when you speak your mind. The assumption will usually be that speaking the truth will lead to an emotional outburst. Let us work in that future: if you say what you want to say, there will be an emotional outburst.
On the surface, we would say that we fear the outburst itself. But if you think about it, that doesn’t really make sense: in first order, it is not you who is undergoing the emotional outburst. The fact that somebody else’s body has reverted to a more basal animalistic state of unreason is completely external to you. They could be in the same room or on the other side of the world; what’s in their head is not in yours.
I will leave this topic for a future article, but it is something to think about. For now, we will assume that for one reason or another, people can truly fear sharing their opinion.
But should you really always speak your mind?
I recently spoke with one of my close female friends about the topic of self-censorship and my fear of it, and she actually changed my view for some instances. She is also the one who asked the question above of what part of conflict I actually fear, and I am severely endebted to her for most of the ideas I develop below.
Inspired by my close friend, I will thus build the case that there exist two classes of opinions: those that must be spoken, and those that should not be. Fearing the reaction of the other person will still indirectly play a role in classifying which of the two classes an opinion belongs to, but it will no longer be the main factor. Hear me out.
Opinions that need to be spoken
All opinions that have to do with actions of the other person that negatively affect you directly, need to be spoken.
The timing of when you speak such opinions does matter. In particular, imagine your spouse makes a joke at your expense in the presence of others, or even just denigrates you. It would not be appropriate to call that person out on the spot: the joke or slight has already been made, and you can hold them accountable in exactly the same way with and without an audience. When you do it with an audience, it harms the reputation of your relationship and causes that person social embarrassment. You can communicate your opinion of what they did without any of this, and if you really loved them, you wouldn’t want to curse your dynamic with either of the latter.
There is a second subset of opinions that need to be spoken, namely those that remain once subtracting all the ones that are described below. An example will follow there.
Opinions that needn’t be spoken
The gist for this class of opinions will basically be that they are (or, expressing them is) unconsidered. That is: there are things you should consider before expressing them which will make you realise that that is not a good idea, so that these opinions should not be spoken.
Specifically, there are two questions to consider when you have an opinion you want to share:
- “What will I achieve by having the other person know this opinion?”
- “Are they the problem, or are there hidden extenuating circumstances which are reflected in their problematic behaviour?”
Let’s look at some examples to clear up some objections you as the reader might have to “self-censor” when either of these questions triggers in favour of not saying what you authentically want to say.
“You’re a retard.”
To start, one might look at that first question and think that it gives room for fear-based self-censorship. Something like “I want to tell them this, but I fear their reaction… Oh well, guess it’s all pointless anyway, might as well shut up.” This would rely on a very subjective judgement of pointlessness, and I would like to re-frame the question using scenarios that use more objective logical deduction.
Let’s say your wife thinks that today you have done many things that genuinely display a lack of intelligent thinking. Should she verbalise her internal monologue out loud, and be as authentic as possible? “To be honest, I think you’ve done nothing right today, and to me you seem like an unrespectable retard.” You and her would hopefully conclude that she should not. But why, if she’d be authentic? Is she self-censoring out of fear? Surely, if you’re a good man, she doesn’t have any kind of pathological reaction to fear from you. Rather, what does verbalising her negative idea of you achieve? It won’t make you better at whatever task you were failing at. It won’t increase the affection in the relationship. Nobody is helped by it. At best, if she is sadistic, her mood will improve due to seeing you hurt, or if she’s narcissistic, her mood will improve because she likes feeling superior to you. Barring those pathologies (which are awfully common), it should be obvious that this kind of opinion is pointless, unproductive, cruel, … which has nothing to do with fearing a reaction.
“You’ve become fat.”
As for the second question, one objection could again be that it gives room for victims of mistreatment to forcibly make excuses for behaviours that do really deserve accountability. Once again, let me reframe with some examples where it is clear that no such misuse is possible.
Say you are struggling with the idea that your husband or wife has become fat. To be more precise, you are worried for their long-term health (both because you want to be with them as long as possible, and even if you were to die early, you would want them to enjoy life as long and as qualitative as possible), and besides your concerns for their health, you find yourself no longer sexually attracted to the state they are in. Now, should you tell him or her what you are feeling?
Bad reasons to self-censor here are cynical ideological slogans along the lines of “every body is equally beautiful” or “bodies change, accept it” or “it’s their body, they can do what they want with it” or “if you have a problem with their body becoming unattractive, then you never cared about their personality in the first place”. These are all morally relativistic nonsense1 and I won’t be concerned with them. In other words: the spouse being fat is problematic.
Now, back to the question. As an example of question 1, ask yourself: “Why do I want my husband/wife to know that I see their fatness, and that it makes me worried for them, and unattracted to them?” In all three subcases, the reason you would want to do it would be – even if it is with the best of intentions possible! – to guilt-trip them into making the change you want to see.
- Why do you want to tell them they are fat? Because you assume they don’t know yet – don’t worry, they do – because if they did know, they would be unhappy with it. If only they were unhappy, then they would change.
- Why do you want to tell them it’s bad for their health? Because it will make them fear bad health. If only they feared, then they would change.
- Why do you want to tell them you’re unattracted to them? Because it will make them feel like they’re wronging you. If only they felt bad for making you suffer, then they would change.
Chances are that the guilt-trip works. But when it doesn’t, you have not only made them feel guilty, but you have also set yourself up for resentment. You never actually said that you wanted your spouse to eat less and move more; that’s the unspoken expectation behind opening up about your lack of attraction to their current bodily state. Now, if they don’t fulfil your wish for change, you will conclude that indeed they don’t care about themselves or about you and become resentful. Nobody is helped in that case!
And so, if the end goal is actually for them to no longer be fat by making permanent lifestyle changes, there is actually no real point in telling them about your concerns. It makes them feel bad and possibly makes you feel bad, and doesn’t make the change you want. Instead, you can just immediately jump into action and nudge your household towards this healthier lifestyle. Once again, this self-censorship has little to do with fear and more with pointlessness.
It could even be argued that verbalising your high-level expectation of “You should eat less and move more.” is almost equally pointless. Although it is much more actionable than “You’ve become fat.” (despite this being equivalent) and although you should talk about these things so that you can align with your spouse about which lifestyle will be maintained in the household (so, which groceries will be bought, which recipes will be cooked, how many gym memberships will be budgetted in, …), you’re unnecessarily putting all responsibility for change on them. As mentioned above: you can also make those changes to the household, and achieve the exact same thing. So then, not speaking your thoughts here is Pareto-better than speaking them.
You now have a way to get the outcome you want. For completeness, let’s go back to your desire to know if your partner (or just your good friend, for that matter) realises they have become fat. Here too, I will suggest that you are distracted by the wrong problem. You think you want them to realise where they are, but if you really think about it, what you may actually want is for them to realise how they got there. After all, then they would know which process to reverse, which is what you hope they will do without you having to be the one to hold them accountable.
Here’s the cool part: that “how they got there” can go up the causal chain as far as you want, and thus up to topics which are much easier to put on the table. This is where question 2 comes in. To keep it concrete: suddenly becoming fat, which is a result of sudden distortions in lifestyle, doesn’t happen out of nowhere. So, you ask yourself: “Are there factors I am not seeing that could have caused their behaviour?” You know that distortions in lifestyle can be caused by various stressors, for example, so now you can take your spouse on a date and ask curiously about whether there is anything that has been putting stress on them lately, with no self-censorship needed. Also, things further up the chain can have broader impact, so even if “Eat less move more.” would be a direct solution, if you had just waited a little longer to gather more information, your direct solution may have instead morphed into “You should spend less time talking with your friend Emily; she’s making you miserable.”
“You’re ignoring me.”
Here is another application of question 2 but not question 1.
Let’s say your good friend, whom you regularly text, has been taking much longer to reply to your texts than usual, and gives noticeably shorter replies. This friend may have even flaked on your hangouts and forgotten your birthday; you feel like you are unimportant to them and that the dynamic is one-sided. You feel that they are signalling that they no longer care about you and you want to text them “If you’re going to take so long to reply with such short messages, don’t even bother anymore, I get the hint. It was nice while it lasted.”
Instead, you decide to wait a little longer to gather more information: there are many extenuating circumstances due to which someone would fail to prioritise texting their friends. Perhaps they are on an insane deadline schedule for school or work. Perhaps they are going through a medical or marital crisis. Perhaps they are on vacation and have put the phone away to do things in the real world. All these circumstances are finite by nature, and eventually you’ll hear about them.
Setting boundaries
In the three scenarios above, you have pinpointed in your head what you think is the obvious problem, and by doing so, you set yourself up for regrettable conversations. You should instead consider that the thing is almost never the thing.
There remains one set of potentially ill-received opinions we have not discussed: opinions about actions that do not cause you measurable harm, which would not be pointless when spoken and which can not be traced back to some other thing. Let’s call them principled boundaries. First we will look at two examples which are not like any of the above.
“Respect my body.”
Let’s say that when your girlfriend is annoyed with you, she slaps your arm, shoves your shoulder, and so on. You, an adult man, won’t feel any lasting physical pain from this, so it’s impossible to make the case that this harms you. Yet, as a mentally healthy man, you also have deep respect for the bodily integrity of your girlfriend, and you feel that this respect should be reciprocated.
You know that speaking up may be ill-received. So, you first ask:
- Question 1: Will asking her to stop doing this be pointless? Definitely not. She can implement your demand immediately, without any hurdles in her way.
- Question 2: Are there extenuating circumstances which could bring her to behave this way against her actual will? Also no, assuming she isn’t experiencing some kind of clinical psychosis. At best, she can claim that “everyone in her family behaves like this; it’s how she was raised; they don’t take it that seriously”, but this is an is-ought fallacy. Your dysfunctional family does not dictate what is good.
We are thus in a scenario we haven’t seen above.
If direct harm is considered all that matters, then it is equally easy to defend speaking up for your principle as it is to shut up about it: you are not directly harmed if you say nothing (although to be fair, being disrespected is at least psychologically painful), and she will not suffer from stopping her behaviour when you say something. So, we need to decide on a tiebreaking rule.
“Respect my family.”
Here is an example where there is truly zero harm, to make things even clearer to reason about.
In plenty of cultures, bad-mouthing someone’s family, and especially someone’s mother, is a boundary which is understood to merit full-on physical violence when crossed. Yet, when I am having a 1-on-1 conversation with someone, them disrespecting my mother theoretically has nothing to do with me directly, so I am not suffering any harm, and since my mother is not there, she isn’t either. And yet, you want to check this person on their behaviour.
You should speak up
The right thing to do in the above two cases is to be authentic, albeit with some care for how the message is delivered: your opinion should be spoken, at least if you believe in second chances. Why is this the rule, rather than self-censoring? Because a principled boundary is two things: it is an unspoken expectation, and it is a compatibility test.
You expect your boundary to not be crossed, and if the other repeatedly does so, it will make you resentful at them, which is unfair if the relationship continues. Secondly, crossing some boundaries is a sign of fundamental incompatibility: you actually cannot spend your life with someone who crosses this boundary – if you could, it would not be a boundary – so it’s not just your internal feeling that is threatened by the boundary being crossed, but the entire existence of the relationship. (It would be you who ends the relationship, but the other would be at fault.) This is the tricky part.
Two families of boundaries
A boundary is a pre-set rule that dictates what you will do in response to somebody else doing something to you. There are many actions you could undertake in response, and only a subset of those actually threatens the relationship, which means we have two families of boundaries. If a boundary does not have such a response, then you should not self-censor.
A male friend of mine gave the following example: let’s say your spouse has a habit of waking you up at night to have sex. This is not a zero-stakes situation: rejecting her advances may hurt your sex life in the future, and you may fear her immediate reaction. So, the self-censorship approach is to just let it happen and be tired afterwards, because at least it saves you the conflict and disappointment. Yet, there are actually ways to assert your boundary without questioning the fact that you’re still a team. You could tell her: “I love you and I would gladly have sex with you at other times of the day, but I need my sleep. If you wake me up again to have sex, I will go sleep in the other bedroom for the rest of the night.” You can easily enforce this boundary while everyone is reassured that the foundation of the relationship isn’t threatened.
In turn, your reaction might cross a boundary she has about physical rejection, which could be part of the relationship-ending family of boundaries. Your rejection may indicate a fundamental incompatibility to her. For this family of boundaries, it becomes no longer obvious what she should and should not say, and I will explore why that is below.
If you don’t believe in second chances
As caveated above, communicating about these things is pointless if you don’t believe in second chances. That’s not necessarily overly cynical: as Tristan Tate once pointed out, we all know how hard it is to even just change ourselves for our own benefit, so getting others to change for our benefit is pretty much a lost cause. I’m not quite convinced, but if we take it as true, there is no point informing anyone about what boundary they crossed. You just break up with them on the spot. Cut your losses and onto more compatible options.
Apart from pointlessness, there are also more subtle issues that come with revealing your boundaries. Firstly, you may open yourself up for temporary faked respect for your boundaries: this is especially relevant when getting closer to you has some kind of exploitative value. For example, if you are in a relationship and reveal that infrequent sex is a dealbreaker to you, somebody may have sex with you as long as it takes to get you to marry them, after which the reward for no longer respecting your boundary is 50% of your wordly assets.
The same friend I mentioned above pointed out another, less obvious issue: when you tell somebody that a change in their behaviour is necessary to keep you, then even when they are willing to make the change now, you will be the target of their resentment if at any point in the future they start having second thoughts about this changed behaviour. People revert to old habits all the time, and in the event it happens, you are now the scapegoat who was responsible for forcing them to do something against their will all this time. By asking for change, you unknowingly point their gun at you.
To solve both of these issues, you want to let someone naturally hit your boundaries if they are the kind of person who would do so, respectively so that their tendency to do so is not hidden from you and so that you are not the future target of resentment. You may have the impulse to warn someone they are getting close to crossing a boundary, but this feeling by itself is already an indicator of incompatibility anyway, so better just let the inevitable play out so that at least you have definitive information.
If you believe in second chances
Assuming that it is worth telling the other person about your boundaries, the question is now how to do it exactly. We have established that you should speak up about your boundaries, but not exactly in what way. In the above examples, it is should be clear that you should communicate “this is not okay”, but arguably, there should be more to your message.
In a previous essay I wrote about asking your spouse to fulfil optional personal preferences, where I concluded that the other person should probably acquiesce to your demands as long as they are feasible and reasonable, although when they don’t, it is your adult responsibility to learn to live with that. With boundaries, the situation is different: not only are you asking to not do something (“this is not okay”), but also, the consequences are no longer just “I will be sad” and rather “I will end this relationship”.
Now, in that same essay, I described the notion of “the relationship as a third entity” to be honoured even when spouses are temporarily frustrated.
Imagine this third entity is a dog. One spouse is in charge of refilling the dog’s water bowl, the other of the food bowl. Now, clearly, both need to keep feeding the dog, or it will die. And moreover, just because your husband left his beard hairs in the sink, it isn’t justified to not feed the dog. And just because your wife left her shoes in the hallway causing you to trip over them, it still isn’t justified to not feed the dog. And it should go without saying that any ultimatum of the form “do this or I will shoot the dog” should be off the table. As one example (…), just because you’re resentful of your wife for a while, that does not relieve you of the duty to stay in shape for her nor to deny her orgasms.
It is basically always wrong to threaten this third entity, but now we have a paradox: you should somehow inform the other person about your boundary to preventatively protect the relationship from the currently unspoken threat you yourself pose to it, without explicitly threatening to end the relationship. In other words: you want to say “If you do this enough, I will shoot the dog.” without saying you will shoot the dog. You don’t want the situation to evolve into a “If I don’t get my way, I will destroy everything we have.” thing, where you are holding a gun to the dog’s head at all times: assuming you don’t intend to shoot it, it’s not really reassuring to the other person to be made so aware of this possibility.
The immediate implication of this is that you should probably not reveal your exact criteria for breaking up, and particularly your system for how multiple boundary crossings accumulate and eventually translate into a breakup. For example, let’s say you have a “three-strikes rule”, where the third time somebody crosses a specific boundary, you break up with them. The worst thing you could probably do is to reveal not only that you keep track of how many strikes somebody has accumulated, but also which strike they are currently on. It doesn’t really achieve anything other than instil fear in the other person.
The right way to inform someone of a fundamental boundary you have, is to tie it to a principle and then say what violating that principle implies to you personally. Let us reconsider the girlfriend waking up the boyfriend to have sex at night, but being rejected for disturbing his sleep. She should obviously not become dramatic – it is natural, but useless – and she should definitely not say: “Have sex with me, or we are done.” What she could however say, is “I know you don’t mean it this way at all and I know you find me attractive, but when I am rejected sexually, it still generates a feeling in me that I’m not beautiful enough.” The principle is that someone should not sexually reject their spouse, and the personal implication of violating that principle is a feeling of being unattractive. In this entire discussion, the word “relationship” is never even mentioned, and the boyfriend’s internal love is not questioned, whilst giving him all the information he needs. Then, if this conflict ever comes to a breaking point, the boyfriend cannot claim surprise or ignorance when she says “I’ve made my decision to no longer be in a relationship with you, because I need to feel beautiful to my man at all times, and I’ve already told you that you do things which make me feel the opposite even though that’s not your intention.”
To solve the other two examples above: you don’t say “If you ever slap me again, we are done.” but you say “I know you are not trying to physically hurt me and I’m not physically hurt, but to me, when I use any kind of violence (slapping, shoving, kicking, pinching, …) it is exclusively when I intend to hurt someone and when I don’t respect the other person’s body. So, when you do any of these things, I feel unsafe and a lack of respect.” And finally, you don’t say “If you ever insult my mother again, we’re done.” but rather “I really value family and an insult to my family is an insult to me.” If this situation ever boils over, it is perfectly reasonable to say “I cannot be with someone if I feel insulted by them, and as I have said, your repeated insults of my family felt like insults to me every time.”
What if I do it anyway?
This article distinguished two classes of authentic opinions that may upset your spouse (or friend, or maybe even family member, etc.): those for which it is productive to speak them – among which personal boundaries – and those for which it’s not.
A natural objection to the latter is that having to consider which opinion not to speak is an indicator of emotional unsafety in the relationship. As I showed, not all omissions are necessarily motivated by walking on eggshells: for example, it’s just unkind to insult your spouse, regardless of whether they get mad or sad about it. The driving motivator for the silence is not fear. But the question still stands: let’s say you do do the unkind thing, then shouldn’t the other person still remain emotionally safe for you? Shouldn’t you be able to make inconsiderate mistakes and recover from them?
The answer is yes in some sense, because the relationship should not be punished for the fallibility of the humans involved. However, there is a very big difference between fallibility and callousness. A person who says “It should be safe for me to say whatever I want to say” may either add to it “…because I don’t always know when I’m inconsiderate, and I hope to receive some grace for those lapses in judgement.” or they might add to it “…because my spouse shouldn’t be so immature to care about how and when I deliver any of my opinions – it’s not my problem she can’t cope with them without getting emotional”. One hopes for mutual care, the other hopes to bulldoze his spouse who is only human.
I used to be that bulldozer. I’ve since learnt that humans are unfortunately animals, not computers.
Firstly, beauty is largely objective and linked to signs of health (which is why animals without societies have a sense of beauty too), and besides, somebody’s subjective taste is narrower than “all bodies”. Secondly, bodies don’t magically change. They may age, but aging takes almost a century, not the handful of months of calorie surplus and lack of movement that will turn a healthy body into a fat body. Yes, that also holds for the vaunted mythical excuses of “menopause” and “slowing metabolism”, wherein weight gain is still always preceded by too much eating and not enough movement. Thirdly, if you have any sort of care for your spouse, you should want them to be pleased with whom they chose to commit to. In the Christian ethic, this is why the husband’s body belongs to his wife and vice versa (1 Cor 7:3-5), and indeed, if you are the steward over someone else’s possession (e.g. you are house-sitting), it is your duty to look after it. Fourthly and finally: nobody buys a car for the doors, but you would be rightfully upset if the dealership came to your house one day and stole your car doors. The car would still drive perfectly fine, but it would be a significantly different car and it would be ridiculous that you being upset would be evidence that you “only cared about the doors”. Similarly, we get into a relationship with a body and a soul, and when one changes significantly, we should not be shamed by manipulators when we notice that it’s no longer the same body and soul we committed ourselves to. ↩︎
