Cara’s Blog

I haven’t written a blog for quite some time. I get to feeling I’m wasting my time. Then I get a lovely little comment like Arthur’s, and a few others who actually give me the feedback I ask for at the end of my ‘Secrets’, and I feel energised to write again.

Relationships are not easy. I don’t care if their romantic or sibling or workmate relationships. They are all mine fields. I think this is because we all put so much importance on every little thing that is said or done. We often read more into it than is actually there.

Well women do anyway. Supposedly you guys don’t. For us, a silence of any length means that there’s something wrong. And usually that ‘the something wrong’ is us. We go back through the most recent interactions and look for clues as to what we said or did wrong.

We ask you, ‘What’s wrong?’ And you say ‘Nothing’, but we know there is and we big it up until it’s a mountain.

I never understood this phenomenon until I read ‘Men are from Mars…etc’ and Gray says that what ‘Nothing’ actually means is…’Nothing I feel like talking about right now…’

If that’s the case, if that’s actually what you mean, then we women will go into even deeper levels of paranoia. ‘Why don’t you want to talk about it now? What have we done that’s so bad that you don’t want to talk about it now?’ We exhaust ourselves trying to work it out.

The down side for you guys in all this is that when you finally feel like talking about it, or have gotten over whatever has upset you…and it maynot have been us… we may very well have gone.

You see, we can’t live with that sort of silence. ‘Nothing’ is a BIG deal to us. And if we get too many ‘Nothings’ then our anxiety reaches a peak where we burn out … and stop feeling and/or we go elsewhere. And that’s when you guys usually go ‘What happened? What did I say?’

We women are pretty good at body language, which makes it seem like we’re mind readers. But we aren’t. And we’re egocentric enough to think that if you’ve got a problem, then it has to be with us. You’re the centre of our world, so we assume we are the centre of yours.

So if you care for her, and want her to hang around, tell her when something is eating at you. You don’t have to get into details if you don’t want. But just let her off the hook.

When she says ‘What’s wrong?’ use it as a cue to work out what you are feeling in that moment… and tell her, even if it’s just ‘ Nothing much, just tired.’ Or ‘Bad day at work…don’t want to talk about it. Just want to forget it.’

You have to add the last little bit because she’ll try to get you to talk about it, because she knows she feels better after talking about a problem. She therefore thinks you will too. And maybe she’s right. But that’s your choice. So tell her what you want to do about it, and once she ‘gets’ that, she’ll feel OK.

If she’s done something- and there are times she has annoyed or angered you- tell her so, if it’s something that is really important. If you’re just in a bad mood and tetchy then tell her that too. ‘Could you stop talking for a while, I’m in a really lousey mood and can’t handle the talking thing right now…’

You may think she’ll get upset if you tell her, and she will, a bit. But she’d rather know that not know what’s bugging you. She will try to fix it if she knows. She can’t if she doesn’t.

I’m not sure why this has come up as a topic for this blog. I guess its just one of the biggies I see that get in the way of perfectly good relationships. Relationships of any kind. And if you want them to continue… even the kind of relationship you have with me here on this site…then silence or ‘Nothing’ may mean you lose something you really value…

Think about it…

x Cara