Nowadays,
even a casual glance at our relationships reveals a perpetual failure on our
part to hold on to a relationship in the long run. We see a lot of youngsters and a few elderly as
well, fretting over their relationships.
Before
the advent of internet & social media, the world has never been so much
connected. In spite of this closeness and connectedness, we have forgotten the
subtle art of communicating.
The bare act of speaking face to face and
conveying our feelings, no longer happens.
This
is as if we are trying to touch something wearing a glove, we are close and yet
there is a barrier between us. We for some reason are emotionally distancing
ourselves, we don’t want to feel the emotions to all their depths, we are
scared to be consumed by them, we are scared to be let down, too scared to bare
ourselves and confront.
In
the event of a misunderstanding or a conflict, we choose not to communicate
directly but to hide ourselves behind the veils of social media and send out a
bleak update on Facebook / WhatsApp / Twitter etc and expect all our
misunderstandings be solved magically.
While
we keep waiting, if the recipient of our highly disguised “update” has read /
seen the update yet, we conveniently disregard the possibility that the
recipient might not even have read / checked out the update completely. It may so happen that they might have seen
it at a wrong time and your so called coded message might not have deciphered
correctly to them.
Communication
is not a one way process, where you put out your update and leave all the blame
on the other for not understanding. It is a two way process. One of the
important things in communicating is taking feedback. When we are speaking to
someone face to face, we can take a note of several non verbal cues. The spoken words and for that matter typed
words as well play only 35% role in communication, the rest 65% are a
combination of non verbal cues. So just imagine how effective our digital
conversations can be, let alone the silent conversational approach through
“Status Updates”.
Having
acknowledged that there is a problem in the way we communicate or not
communicate. Let’s see what we can do
about it.
Firstly,
we need to understand that, for any relation, not only romantic, to be successful,
there needs to be timely expression
of feelings and things that concern. When we suppress ourselves and fail to
communicate effectively, we give a chance to the other person to think of all
the possibilities, highly likely, all of them false assumptions.
We
should refrain ourselves from bottling up things and exploding all at once.
Instead when we develop a trust based communication, to open up and clear
things as and when they arise, we do ourselves a favour in the long run.
Secondly,
when things go wrong, it happens because we are only humans. We need to make a
deliberate attempt to resolve issues whenever they crop up. Meet up personally,
somewhere outside of your regular hangout places. Try to reach out &
discuss the issue with an open mind, you will be surprised by the reality &
the ease with which the things can be sorted out, when you confront and discuss
things directly.
In
order to have such a discussion and to take it to this level, it requires two
people who are pretty serious about their relationship.
Hoping
to solve your problems by posting updates about them on social media is
illogical and ridiculous to think of. A successful relationship
needs two people, who are ready to commit to each other and there is an effort
from both the sides to make it happen. What makes a relationship work
is not how similar you are, it is actually the part where you have the best
understanding of your differences.
It requires continuous effort, commitment
and two people who refuse to give up on each other, to make any relationship
work.
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