Microattunement Part 3: Sites of Learning — the Dyad
What are the dyads — the significant relationships with another person, forming the smallest possible human group — that we form during our lives? Tracking through the life course, they include our relationships
¶ with each parent
¶ with each sibling
¶ with close childhood friends
¶ with particular extended family members
¶ with school and university friends
¶ with adult friends
¶ with particular workplace associates
¶ with particular members of sports or other teams
¶ with mentors
¶ with fellow adventurers
¶ with particular neighbours or fellow inhabitants
¶ with life partners
¶ with own children
¶ with own grandchildren
Over a lifetime, this is a lot of one-to-one relationships. The last time I counted mine, it was close to the Dunbar number of around 150.
These are our deepest human relationships. Together, they constitute a significant source of value and influence in our lives — both positive and negative — in different ways at different times. The question here is, could their closeness and their particular qualities in relation to ourselves also become a mutual learning resource?
Symmetry and Asymmetry in Dyadic Relationships
What are the qualitative differences in these relationships? Perhaps the most obvious quality is the strength of attachment we feel — recognising that this may change over time, as we and the other person also change.
There’s no recipe for the amount and distribution of attachment over our relationships. Some of us may have very few or even no strong attachments. Others may have very many. And attachment can be a mysterious quality, because it is not necessarily reciprocal. We may be strongly drawn to someone who simply tolerates us, and vice versa. So symmetry of feelings is not a given.
Another distinguishing characteristic is the power differential within relationships. This is another mysterious quality, because it largely depends on perception. Either or both members of a dyad may be conscious or entirely unconscious of it. Take differences in physical size and strength as an example. If it is never exercised, it may go completely unnoticed. But once the weaker person has suffered at the hands of the stronger, it will always cloud the relationship. And even without being exercised, power differentials can matter — for example when one person feels intimidated by the other, even in their imagination. Think about asymmetries of ‘cool’ here.
Let’s hypothesise that dyads as sites of learning arise most naturally when there are reasonably balanced symmetries of attachment and power. Notice that these conditions can still tolerate other significant differences. For example, grandparents and their grandchildren can form deep and equal attachments, despite their difference in ages.
The Dyad as a Site of Learning to Cope With Our Selves
Our selves — and the way they influence our behaviour — are not necessarily apparent to us in the heat of the moment. What if we could give permission to a significant other to draw our attention to what seems to them to be happening to us? What if it were possible to discuss our preoccupations and tendencies in a trusted relationship with another person who might have experienced the same urges themselves? What if these kinds of exchanges could be normalised so that they are free of judgement, shame or diffidence?
Our social practices cover over much of our feelings and urges with guilt and uncertainty, so that stoic silence is often the norm. Could we become courageous enough to break this spell of silence, and discover the potential of a close relationship as a source of mutual learning?
In a world of prideful individualism this seems like a big step to take. So we keep our discomforts hidden from those who are close to us, and in extremis we consult more distant professionals as strangers instead. In doing so, we assume that we are better served by someone who is ‘objective’ and can operate perfectly adequately without having experienced historical context about us.
How much better if we could normalise our sometimes turbulent selfhood by acknowledging it in our everyday conversation, with people who already know and have regard for us — and who are attuned to the value of shared learning? And maybe address things for them at the same time?
The need here is to have a non-confrontational language for speaking about our noticings of one another. And we have to work our way into developing this language as an aspect of everyday conversational exchange. Something like:
“I’m noticing that I’m feeling uncomfortable about the way you’re talking at present — like there’s something going on with you that I don’t quite understand. Can you say more about what you’re feeling just now?”
Coming to terms with each of our selves and their influence on our conduct is work — for many of us, work of a lifetime. But relationships of equality with significant others could become a means of sharing this work.
The Dyad as a Site of Conversational Experimentation
A second learning opportunity in a dyadic relationship has to do with one of the trickiest aspects of everyday conduct: knowing how our words and intentions land with others. Our utterances and gestures come fully loaded with intentionality and purpose. But how they are received by their audience can be an entirely different matter. Communication includes shades of meaning and expression that are always open to interpretation, and so our words may land in ways that we don’t intend at all.
As with our feelings, our conventional social practices easily cover over these mis-steps so that we can remain blind to them. But there’s a golden opportunity for conversational learning in a dyad, that we might call saying again.
Like learning about our selves, this opportunity depends on the quality of a particular dyadic relationship. The requirement is that in their conversational exchanges, both people are listening not only to what is being said, but to the details of its expression— the echoes, the overtones, and the felt implications of each utterance. It’s a meta-practice, involving sensing and responding at two levels at the same time. So it could invite rejoinders like:
“That feels really hurtful…could you try saying it a bit differently?”
“ You seem to be trying to get me to think such and such…is that really what you’re trying to do?”
So much about our one-to-one exchanges depend on unspoken assumptions and the conventions of conduct that go with these assumptions. And this relates to our self-consciousness as performers in social situations — our urge to ‘do what’s expected of us’. It takes a real effort and a special kind of courage — as well as a kind of nuanced diplomacy — to break through these conventions in order to reach a practical prospect of mutual learning.
And even though I recognise the value of this kind of meta-conduct myself, I confess that I find it really awkward and difficult to do.
All of this is so unlike normal one-to-one conversational practice that spelled out as it is here, it sounds quite weird and artificial. But perhaps it might depend on a beginning that can take place in a larger, and less individually exposing site of learning: in the potentially supportive embrace of a specially convened group structure, the Crew.
So now to Microattunement Part 4: Sites of Learning — the Small Group.
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