Classic Relationship Issues

A few classic situations pop up again and again in interpersonal relationships, real and fictional.

To Confess Or Not To Confess

Perhaps the most classic one involve two friends with sexual orientations that would not be inconsistent with having a romantic relationship with each other. One friend can "confess" a desire to transform their friendship into something more. But this carries risk. The friendship is valuable in and of itself. A rejected confession could result not just in the friendship not being transformed, but also in the loss of the friendship. 

Even an accepted confession resulting in a mutually agreed transformation of the relationship involves risk. Romantic relationships are often more vulnerable to breakups, largely because they demand more of the people involved, than mere friendships. The romance might flourish briefly, only to sour into a breakup, sacrificing the valuable close friendship.

So, it is only wise to confess your feelings for a friend if that feelings turn out to be mutual, and if transforming the relationship will produce a stable romance. If one isn't confident that either of these things won't happen, one shouldn't ask.

The trouble is that lots of people are bad in accurately predicting who someone else will respond to an expressed desire to transform the relationship, i.e. to a confession, and in accurately predicting whether a relationship would work if they agreed to go down that relationship path. And, one wants to gather information about a predicted outcome in a way that doesn't defeat the purpose of not damaging the existing positive friendship, if possible.

When people are well socialized and socially observant, they unobtrusively collect clues from the other person's actions, and leave clues about their own feelings, that makes the outcome clear and leads to a correct decision about whether to confess (or what kind of transformation in the relationship to seek), in a way that doesn't threaten the existing relationship. 

But if clues and signals from the other person are misinterpreted (perhaps because one person did something easily misinterpreted, or perhaps because one person reads too much into an action because they want it to mean something), or simply not considered at all, the wrong decision can be made. 

Maybe a potential relationship that both people want and that would thrive doesn't happen, because neither person can accurately read what the other is feeling. Maybe one person misreads a signal as a sign of interest when it isn't one and makes an inappropriate confession that is rejected, and damages the relationship.

A shared culture can provide a script to navigate these situations, by giving both people in the relationship a way to assign a shared meaning to hints dropped, and by preventing "false positive" interpretations of something not intended as a hint of interest or disinterest as something that it isn't. A shared culture also makes it possible to more accurately distinguish between giving and receiving hints that won't damage a relationship, and making an actual confession of feelings or desires that can threaten a relationship.

Even this isn't perfect, however. One of the reasons that hints are just hints, is that a person's reaction to a confession can depend upon how heartfelt and firm the confession itself is. A person receiving a confession might accept a bold, unwavering, and unconditional request to begin a romantic relationship even if they were "on the fence" before being asked, but might reject a lukewarm confession.

Also, even if one person has perfectly understood the other person's hints and clues, and accurately predicts the other person's immediate reaction, predicting how stable the more romantic relationship will be once begun, involves more than just guessing accurately what the other person is thinking immediately.

For example, an otherwise compatible couple might differ strongly about their desire to have children soon, or some other unknown strong incompatibility, that neither has had any occasion to learn from the other.

But, part of the issue here is that intense relationships can and more often than not do fail when they fail, for reasons completed unrelated to miscommunications, like financial pressures, lack of family or community approval, and circumstances that force a burdensome long term relationship. The factors that determine if a relationship will survive are very different than those that determine if one will form.

For a variety of reasons, our emerging shared culture is less good at dealing with this situations than it could be, although there is plenty of room for improvement. 

Solutions in this case mostly involved developing a clearer shared understanding of what does and does not count as a hint that is widely enough known that even socially inept people can navigate it.

Educations that helps people develop accurate, evidence based, understandings of what makes relationships last and fail would also help.

Of course, in practice, the law, the education system, and formal institutions more generally, don't even acknowledge what is going on in classic relationship situations like these, let alone providing meaningful, accurate, useful, and widely shares understandings about them.

Education isn't the first problem, however. One can't communicate a share of shared cultural understandings and evidence based data about relationship survival until those things exist and are the subject of widespread consensus understandings. But disruptions to the status quo, like feminism, have left with a vacuum, or awash in a maelstrom of dispute. This isn't to say that the old status quo was good and should be returned to, but a new status quo consensus doesn't exist yet, as a result of widespread cultural change and disruption.

Consent To Sex

Consent to sex is a form of transformation of a relationship that fits this model. Whether or not you agree concerning what "hints" did mean or mean now, one can certainly imagine a plausible world in which going out on a date with someone, in which accepting a date ending in eating out with the man paying for drinks which the woman accepts, an agreed lack of curfew and relocation to the man's home after eating out, a woman wearing sexy lingerie and a lot of make up and a party outfit, a man dressing up, a date that is one on one, and a previous steamy kiss exchanged by the couple at a previous date, are a set of mutually accepted clues that an expressed desire to have sex at the man's home at the conclusion of the date will be received positively and accepted. This doesn't dispense with the need to actually ask, but it greatly reduces the risk of asking.

But with accepted shared cultural understandings about the meanings of "hints" like these in a state of flux, it is not much harder to interpret hints in advance of asking for sex. This disruption was no accident. Feminist reformers concluded that the status quo made it too hard for a woman to say no to sex even when they felt uncomfortable about it, resulting in harm, on average to women, and deliberately set out to disrupt the path of socially accepted hints that laid the groundwork for this happening. But because the movement that did this didn't have a good appreciation of the importance of shared understandings regarding hints that a question will or will not be accepted favorably before it is actually asked, the subtle point of needing to ask even following lots of clues that the answer will be "yes", resulted in a wiping away of previous shared understandings about the meaning of subtle clues under the old status quo, without the real development of a new script or a new set of widely share understandings about clues regarding an intent to have sex. This, of course, led to  more misunderstandings between couples over these issues, even if it did have the desired effect of reducing the pressure on women to have sex when they were uncomfortable doing so. 

Lost In Translation Issues

Another miscommunication issue is more common in the context of an ongoing, more or less stable relationship.

One person in a relationship wants the other person in the relationship to take some action. Maybe they want to be praised out loud for doing something good, or wants to be asked about what is going on with them more often. Often, this is something that the other person in the relationship would be happy to do if they understood its importance to their partner.

So, the person who wants their partner to do something says or does something that they believe communicates their desire to their partner. But, their partner totally doesn't gain the desired understanding from the statement or action that was intended to communicate the desire. But an inability to even communicate a desire to a partner can be frustrating at a minimum and, in a worst case, can do long term harm to a relationship.

Usually, this happens because the person communicating the desire is too subtle or conceptualizes their desire in a way that doesn't fit into a framework of understanding of the person to whom the desire is communicated. Sometimes it is too subtle out of politeness. Sometimes it is too subtle because it is a "big ask" and the person communicating the desire wants to do so in a way that can be discouraged is asking too much without damaging the relationship.

A shared culture can provide a script to navigate these situations as well. But often, ways of communicating within a relationship are highly gendered, so that even opposite sex couples that have a shared culture are insufficiently well-socialized to understand what particular words or acts are really intended to mean. 

For a variety of reasons, our emerging shared culture is less good at dealing with this situations than it could be, although there is plenty of room for improvement. 

Solutions in this case mostly involve helping couples to develop a language that accurately communicates desires to their partners with an appropriate level of urgency so that mistranslations don't occur and are responded to appropriate in the context of social scripts that are developed for couples to use.

Again, the formal institutions in our society don't even attempt to engage with these interpersonal interactions at such an up close and fact rich level of detail and understanding, even though most people are intuitively aware of the issues which often end up being addressed in comedy and humor, rather than with any kind of formal instruction.