Why You Really Shouldn’t Talk About Your Relationship With Other People
There’s a lot of bad and not too much good that comes from sharing the particulars of our relationship with others.
There’s a famous parable that you might’ve heard of: It’s about a group of blind men that encounter an elephant. None of the men had ever come across the animal before. They each extend out a hand and touch a different part of it—one the tusk, one the the leg, one the stomach, and so on—and they then try to describe what they believe the rest of it must be like. Of course, they all have wildly different descriptions of the nature of the beast. Something similar happens when we vent about our partner with the other people in our lives.
What’s Being Said
The hearer is only getting one perspective. They’re only hearing half the story, and that half concerns an acquaintance who they’re presumably close to and likely to lean in favor of regardless of the particulars. A slanted perspective is shared, and the hearer is already aligned with the individual sharing it. Even if the situation were objectively represented (which it won’t be), the feedback from the listener would still favor the person in the relationship that they’re closer to. This makes for a damaging feedback loop…
