Consentin(g) Communication - ambiguity in meaning

Times are changing for how we interact. We want certainty; we want to say for sure that something is or is not meant. We parse communication as either conveying that binary information or being bad. People who give less certainty are called bad communicators. I disagree. It might seem odd that ambiguity contributes to greater understanding, not less. That attitude is part of how we see communication nowadays.

The internet and mobile telephony have integrated themselves into our lives, so that we write to more of our friends more often. Communication is immediate; people are impatient with delays and dawdling. Not responding to some of the endless stream of messages has become a social crime called ‘ghosting’; people talk freely of the anxiety they feel without instant replies, and the responsibility of others to spare them that pain.

I didn’t grow up in this world. I’m an older millennial, but my family was late in adopting technology and I didn’t have many friends to stay in touch with; I saw them at school anyway. I got a mobile phone for university because my mother and I agreed that using the payphone at college to talk to each other would be awkward and expensive. The people I met there already lived in a world of text messages, not one of popping over to the common room to meet whoever was there.

I didn’t mind the anxiety of not knowing whom I’d meet there. That was part of life: sometimes it’d be no-one, just the newspaper and then a retreat back to my room. Sometimes one person, sometimes another: acquaintances I was too shy to hunt down to say hello to, but whom it was nice to greet in person. There was no certainty; I couldn’t guarantee that someone would be waiting for me, nor how long that person would be available. People who didn’t want to talk didn’t talk, and people who changed their minds about talking left to do other things. That could mean a lot of things: that they had other things to do; that they had only been being polite; that they liked me, but not the subject of the conversation; that they were friendly but not so friendly they’d spend longer together; or that they simply had personal issues of their own. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my business to pry into their lives. I lived with the uncertainty, content not to make windows into people’s souls.

One of my genuine friends introduced me to Messenger, a programme that gradually seeped into my life. She commented that my writing was very flat: I never used the ‘smileys’ or emoticons that nowadays are called emojis. I even avoided exclamation marks, having been brought up to think of them as a bit uncouth: a giant flashing neon signpost in the fine architecture of the written word. I’d not come across emoticons much before; they were just a strange part of a subcultural rabbit-hole that I didn’t care for.

My friend was just the first sign I saw of a trend that has stormed the world. People love emoticons, and it seems a big part of that is the ability to firmly define their emotions. Adding a smiley face to a sentence removes ambiguity; everyone knows that you mean to be pleasant or to tell a joke. They don’t really have to engage with you; to consider who you are, whether you’re a mean, taunting sort of person, to guess for the moment and bear the alternatives in mind for the future. They just take the message as it is: a short, simple snippet, shorn of all complexity and context, all bearing on future or past interactions removed. All that matters is that a message exists; that someone bothered to send them something right now.

You can tell I disapprove. Ambiguity is an essential part of language and human interaction. It allows us to smooth over our differences, and we all have differences. Relationships aren’t built on absolute over-sharing. Good people hide little things from each other: never the really big things, but little things, like whether they love that top as much as you do. Diplomacy is built on ambiguity: on building trust and friendship through pleasant interactions without rubbing each other raw about divergent interests. Tactful people leave open things that don’t need to be defined to avoid giving unwanted offence.

On top of this, sometimes there are multiple options. Rather than expressing a simple desire for one option, it might be politic to express a less defined tendency to prefer one set of those options. Not everything in life has to be binary and absolute. Our preferences themselves aren’t, so a bit of ambiguity might actually better reflect our thoughts and feelings than definitive, simple messages. That’s how we reach agreement, be it on an arms treaty or which restaurant the group wants to dine at. We start off trying to shift the focus in a probabilistic manner, gradually gauging others’ desires without anyone being so rude or gauche as to directly demand something that might prove to be irreconcilable with others’ preferences. We work out a compromise that everyone can accept without the conflict and pain of direct rejection.

Unless we’re right-wingers in the UK, in which case we make demands of the EU, or of the rest of the population, or of the ministers in power, and expect everyone to tread delicately around our emotions despite putting them out there to be trodden on.

Psychological studies show us that direct rejection is painful: the brain activity is very similar to physical pain. It hurts. It doesn’t build relationships; it’s something to be avoided. Ambiguity in language does avoid this pain, if we can only learn to deal with it.

The flip side of hating ambiguity is that we don’t necessarily end up with conflict and rejection even if we are definite and demanding. Agreeable, good, well-meaning people will still try to avoid that conflict. That’s why tact is so important: if your friends are agreeable, good people then they will sacrifice their desires in the face of tactless statements of wants and needs. Yet if they’re agreeable, good people they deserve better. Tact is how we avoid taking advantage of good people. And if they’re not good people, we probably don’t want to be friends with them.

As an aside, this is what has happened in national politics. Agreeable, well-meaning people have caved in to regressive demands from right-wing populists and agitators not because they are sensible things to want, but because they are demands. Wishy-washy do-gooders tell each other that they must give some ground to these demands, based on their deep dislike of hurting and rejecting others. But politics isn’t dealing with friends: it’s about right and wrong. A lot of life, in fact, has right and wrong in it, and being agreeable (in the psychologists’ sense of avoiding conflict), although superficially good, can be hugely problematic. The hackneyed saying ‘for evil to flourish it is enough for good men to do nothing’ is popular for a reason. Sometimes conflict is necessary, and although I’m a naturally very agreeable person, I have spent years spotting areas of right and wrong where I resent the fact that others are taking advantage of agreeableness. So I often speak my mind instead, about ideas and politics: not because I have no idea of the pain it might cause others, but because I’m tired of the pain it causes me and the world if I don’t. Bad ideas must be stopped, no matter the [emotional] cost. In that respect, ideas are distinct from social interaction.

And it is this conflict-avoidance that leads us to sexism. Women are gradually realising that assault shouldn’t be a part of life, and men too, albeit more slowly. They are impatient with the old pretences that everything is alright; they want the disturbing, looming threats in their lives resolved and removed.

But women are trained to be passive and helpful; to be conflict resolvers far more than men. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t do-gooding men who hate conflict. I count myself as such a person; I abhor emotional conflict, to the extent I cannot stand soap operas because of the painful tactlessness on display. I loathe farce, because I can’t find any humour in another’s suffering. Many women, in contrast, love the emotional ups and downs of such entertainment. Agreeableness and conflict-avoidance are not just a sexist issue.

In relationships demands and tactlessness very easily become abuse. This is why it’s a noted and often-considered fact that agreeable, nice people are disproportionately represented amongst abuse victims. These are people who end up confused by their situation, not understanding how doing the emotionally nice thing all the time can cause them such misery, and hating themselves for causing their abuser pain when they finally do end the relationship.

Sexual relationships are not built through plain demands. It’s not romantic or exciting when a man requests sex; it’s not romantic or exciting if he makes his intention clear by asking a stranger to a dinner date, either. Those actions force women to be rejectors, and a culture which requires men to make formal moves forces them to open themselves up to rejection. This might not seem like a big deal to people on the other side: how hard can it be to reject someone, or to be rejected? Surely it’s a tiny awkwardness in a life filled with pain, disease and suffering? But we all know this to be specious. Whichever side we are on, we hate the situation, and it crops up rarely in other circumstances. We mostly naturally employ tact and delicacy to avoid flat-out rejection.

It's only in the world of relationships, which are half-scripted for us based on notions of a man formally asking another man for his female property, that we insist on such a strange social set up. We have dropped the ‘another man’ part of the script, but not the ‘formally asking for female property’ part. Women are still objects to be requested, not people to be interacted with. Some women like this: it frees them from the difficult and complex task of engaging, interacting, encouraging and getting anxious about whether interest is reciprocated. In the man’s world, men ask or do not ask, and that is that.

But in most other human interactions interest, liking, decisions… anything, really… are all reached through a joyful dance of ambiguous meanings, subtle implications, gentle climb-downs, suggestions, hints and careful changes of subject. Only children and people with mental abnormalities state their demands up front; and only Brexiters expect them always to be met and blame their pain of rejection on other people.

We use language to convey meaning probabilistically. When I was very young, I learned about something mostly pointless called a box plot. There is a mean, a box representing the confidence interval, and lines at either end representing the full range. A box plot of potential meanings is what we gradually build up through conversation: we shift the mean slightly, extend the range, see that someone pushes the other way and abandon that; or join in and follow up by moving the confidence interval further towards that end of the range with further careful statements. And as we know someone better, we become more comfortable with larger and larger shifts in meaning all at once.

We want to exchange ideas but not be judged negatively for thoughts the other person does not respect. So we probe for signs that the other person wants something too, and only when we have enough confidence do we act. The level of confidence needed varies from person to person: some are thoughtless/forthright and trust in their own likeability; others sensitive and cautious. But confidence can never be 100%. A definite yes can always be revoked: other people don’t always know their own minds, or can’t always speak for themselves in the future.

That is why ambiguity is so wonderful: it allows us to gently probe ideas and attitudes without forthrightly stamping on others’ sensibilities. When we stamp, it can be criminal. Relationships are built on gradual discovery or creation of great green fields of overlapping desires and ideas. Someone wary of conflict will approach things cautiously; extend a verbal feeler or two, and then a few more, and then a few more. Others jump right in, and as a tolerant person, I’m happy with that… but someone who struggles to say ‘no’ could also end up in unhappy situations. That has happened to people I know. On the other end impatient people with low confidence thresholds assume that caution is rejection, and move on; if the other person isn’t instantly positive, then he is being rude. This is the echo of modern society that irks me. It’s just not how I am; I regret fitting in even less than I did, but I draw the line at being called rude or thoughtless because of it. I have always been a cautious person, but that caution has become so atypical that it is now considered offensive.

The fear of rejection, of saying something unwelcome, or of imposing when unwanted, are debilitating: it’s easy to get into vicious cycles of delaying replies because it’s hard to word things carefully, and then delaying them further to avoid dealing with the awkwardness of replying so late. This is an unproductive and extreme version of being socially cautious: it’s being so cautious as to be awkward. No-one should aspire to such a life. But a bit more caution - a few more attempts to judge which way the wind is blowing before choosing a direction – is something that society could benefit from.

You might dismiss me as a crank, but the opposite of me, the character-type that society is building instead, is not a nice person. Anxious, oblivious, too impatient to engage in verbal foreplay, we are growing into a people who, despite being so connected, don’t properly connect with each other. We send pictures of genitalia in place of conversation; we shout and declaim on supposedly conversational panel shows; we offer scripted gestures and pictures in response to standard messages such as ‘feeling a bit down’ or ‘something odd happened today’. It is presence that matters, not content.

And the culmination of all this is rape. Most rape is not a stranger attacking someone in a dark alley. It is two people who have already interacted, with one of them steamrolling over the other’s social cues. It is one very nice, agreeable person being ignored by an oblivious person who is too intent on their own reading of the situation. It is a person with a very low threshold to act, or who doesn’t conceive of resistance at all: for them everything is either forbidden or allowed, and so many people use slightly rejecting phrases as invitations to make more effort that the rapist can twist everything to fit their desires. For him there always remains the possibility that the woman is being hard to get, and people who don’t practice real communication find it impossible to judge what that probability is, or how big it should be before one acts. 

I can’t imagine being so insensitive to another’s communication, but then I enjoy ambiguity and the gentle drift of conversation forward or backward in concert with another person. I want to be near-certain that both of us want to go in that direction; it takes two to drive the direction of interaction. This is not masterful, it’s not romantic in the sweep-off-her-feet way, and it’s often regarded as antisocial, and recently it was even called psychopathic. But if being oblivious to the possibility of rejection is romantic, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. 

I prefer being thoughtful about others, and all around me I see society being unthoughtful and becoming less so. We are all different, and to interact socially we need to smooth over those differences with the buffers of tact and ambiguity; with gentle probabilistic push-and-shove towards different ideas and choices, working out where and how we can fit together. This needs real language and conversation, not the instant gratification of text messages, messages with no meaning and emoticons.