The Virtues of Let's-Not-Talk Therapy

Contrary to popular opinion, talking things out doesn’t always lead to greater harmony. It’s easy to see why. Humans are complicated, with lots of conflicting appetites to juggle even within just one individual. The more balls in the air the harder it is to juggle them. Sometimes it’s better to pocket a few. Bite your tongue. Leave things unsaid and, if possible, unfelt. Tuck in your elbows to make room for others. There’s no reason to assume that if everyone juts their elbows, speaking their minds and hearts, we’re destined to reach a state of total agreement and harmony.

We’d like to think that intimacy is best served by honesty. It is, and it isn’t. To feel safe in intimacy we want two opposites—total honesty and total affirmation. During the honeymoon period, it’s easy to supply both, totally honest affirmation. After that, it gets trickier because sometimes honesty is not affirming and affirmations wouldn’t be honest. It can cost you big to be dishonest, but it can also cost you big to be honest. Brad Paisley captures this tension beautifully in his song "That's Love."

We’re often told not to try to change your partner. Accept them as they are. At the extreme you get “You can’t change other people. You can only change your attitude toward them.” That’s not completely true. We have big influences on each other, especially in intimacy, and we can’t always change our attitude toward them.

Still, it’s an argument for biting your tongue, and there’s something to it, but only if we remember that, in intimacy, you can’t help but try to change your partner.

"Live and let live" is easy when you don’t have to live with other. In intimacy, your preferences are entangled. There will be conflicts that matter to you both, and you can’t help trying to get your partner to come around to your preferences, even over trivial things like what show to watch.

The question isn’t whether biting your tongue is always good or always bad. Rather, it’s when to blurt or bite, when to spread your wings and express yourself, and when to tuck them in to make room for your partner.

Romance treats falling in love as the easy union of two people surrendering themselves into one happily-ever-after couple. That’s part of it, but it overlooks the complications. A romantic union is actually six loves juggled:

I love you.
You love me.
I love me.
You love you.
I love us.
You love us.

There will be tradeoffs. Too much biting your tongue shortchanges your self-love. Too much preference-voicing shortchanges your love of each other and the partnership.

This suggests sorting your preferences into three bins:

The preferences you voice hoping that your partner will change.

The preferences you don’t voice now but might someday.

The preferences you don’t voice and are trying to get over within yourself to accommodate your partner.

You might voice your preference for the toilet seat being left up or down. You might hope that someday you’ll be able to express your preference that your partner exercise more but decide that now is not time to bring it up. And you might wish that they did something about their chattering but you’re trying to get over it because you don’t bet they’ll ever change and it’s not worth pushing.

It’s not easy figuring out which of your preferences belong in which category. Sometimes you’ll bring up something too soon or too late. Sometimes you’ll try to get over a preference that in retrospect you see as a red flag you should have addressed earlier.

We’re not robots. You can’t just reprogram your partner or yourself, though you might wish you could. You might resolve and pledge not to bring something up but end up blurting it anyway.

Sometimes we’re told that it’s disrespectful to voice our criticism. It is and it isn’t. It can feel insulting, but it honors a person’s ability to hear it. Not voicing your criticism honors a person’s feelings by humoring them, not honoring their ability to hear what you really think. Again, trade-offs.

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The Power of Positive Regard

Married to Two People: The Romantic Life of Widows

Some partners are simpler than others—easygoing, happy to accommodate. Often, a more difficult partner finds compatibility with a simpler one. Several male friends have confided that their fiery, attractive partners could get any guy for a night but that they’re the only ones who can go the distance.

The challenge of figuring out when to talk or not talk applies to all relationships, in family, friendships, business partnerships, work lives and even politics.

A new book called The Paradox of Democracy deals with just that. We tend to assume that democracies are liberal. They often start out that way, but the chaos and complications of everyone speaking their minds all the time become overwhelming, whetting the appetite for greater simplicity and thus for authoritarians. Today, there are many authoritarian democracies in which, through threats and rewards, citizens end up supporting tyrants.

We often wish that politicians were more honest, but they too are struggling with the intimacy challenge. To survive, they have to remain popular—in effect, intimate with a diverse majority. That means they have to juggle honesty and affirmation. Too much honesty and they’ll fail. They have to pander, although if it’s all they do, they either lose trust or become authoritarian dictators, the political equivalent of a sweet-talking philanderer, giving the false impression of caring while cheating behind your back.

Healthy intimacy can be grounded in a paradox: “What we love about each other is that we can talk about anything (provided we don’t). Some of the healthiest relationships merge their ambivalences, with ironic, winking recognition of the inescapable paradox of intimacy. Sometimes it’s best to talk it out. Sometimes it’s better to keep it to yourself. It’s not easy to know when to do which, so it’s also best to be able to laugh about the challenge.