Yesterday, I went out with three friends to have Nasi Ambeng. We had tedious conversations which was full of ‘battling’ and constant back and forth. After sleeping on it, I think I understand why it’s not fun to speak to him. We were talking about the changes he made in his life (getting a new mattress etc), and when I asked about his mattress he interrupted me. He would go on to interject snarky comments into subsequent conversations. It’s like he felt the need to correct me every single time I say something. But it wasn’t an articulated disagreement, it was more like a reproach for my making of ‘assumptions’. That’s what got on my nerves until I lost my patience, and the annoyance turned into anger. I wouldn’t mind so much if he elaborated on what he disagreed with, then we can get it out of the way.
Halfway through, I was accused of making ‘assumptions’ for certain comments I made. Yet he himself made ‘assumptions’ of similar nature which was apparent from the comments he made. The only difference was he pointed out the comments I made, while failing to notice the same in him. To be honest, in the beginning I was trying to annoy him by misspelling his name… I myself was guilty of it, except I stopped and he didn’t. Well, he hasn’t been sleeping well for the past few weeks which might explain the lack of tact and social astuteness.
What I need is to set clearer boundaries, I shouldn’t lashed out at him yesterday. I should have done what Jordan Peterson recommended, “Use a rule of three.” That’s actually a gracious and generous approach towards dealing with people, because not everyone is conscious of their speech and deeds. This gives others the benefit of the doubt, while not being a pushover at the same time.
Take note when someone does something disruptive, and leave it be. If the person does it again, that probably wasn’t mere coincidence. If the person does it a third time, bring it up.
Jordan Peterson put it more succinctly here (0:43 to 3:28):
Don’t lose an opportunity to grapple with something that objects you especially when the objection is rather small.
You say, well I can put up with it.
Fair enough like you don’t want to make everything into a war, I usually use a rule of three if we’re interacting and you do something that I find disruptive I’ll note it. It’s like potential dragon, and I leave it be.
And if you do it again, I’m like oh yeah that probably wasn’t merely situational. But I’ll leave it be because that’s still not enough evidence.
But if you do it a third time, then I’ll say hey I just noticed this and you’ll say nah that didn’t happen.
And I’ll say yeah not only did it happen, but it happened here, and it happened here; and I’m not making this up so there’s something going on here, like I’m not ignoring it and we can get to the bottom of it.
And they’ll come up with a bunch of objections about why that isn’t necessary, and you push those aside; and they’ll come up with a few more objections and then push those aside.
And then usually they’ll get mad or burst into tears, and if you push that aside then you get to have a conversation and then you can solve the problem.
But man you got to be a monster, because first of all you need six arguments about why the objections aren’t going to stop you, and then you have to not be intimidated by the anger, and then you have to not be swamped by compassion about the tears – and then you can have a conversation and people don’t do that.
They won’t do that, so they don’t solve the problems. And so the problems accrue, and if they accrue over 15 years of a relationship then they end up fat, ugly and in divorce court.
You can’t build an interesting and in-depth conversation without mutually agreed ‘assumptions’ embedded within it. Like if you want to build a tower, there better be a ton of steels in it. As compared to building a simple chair that consists of fewer subcomponents. I think it also depends on how I put forth the ‘assumptions’, maybe I could have framed it as questions instead.
In my previous article What kind of friendships are you optimising for?, I wrote about the importance of aligning your thoughts and actions. I can’t debate and try to build a nurturing group at the same time. There is a time and place for each of them. It’s disruptive if someone tries to debate when we’re having a group conversation. I need to know how to politely articulate my displeasure and change the topic.
As a rule of thumb, let the conversation flows on its own; there is no need to control it, there isn’t a list of topics we have to cover. When it gets stale, boring or monopolised then there may be a need to step in and shift or initiate a new topic.
I realise two of my friends kept asking me questions about myself. They have been asking about the bootcamp I’m attending and my family. Maybe I’ll talk about it someday.
Last updated: 25 July 2021