You Don’t Have to Understand Me. But Could You Try?

Never before have we had so many ways to get to know other people, yet we can be remarkably quick to decide that we already know who they are.

We have access to countless human stories, experiences and perspectives. We can talk to people living on the other side of the world, discover different cultures and listen to the stories of people we will probably never meet in person. A few clicks are all it takes to find out how they live, what they think and what they are facing.

And sometimes a single sentence, one decision or a conversation lasting just a few minutes is enough for us to form a very definite opinion of someone.

Someone didn’t reply to a message, so they are obviously ignoring us. Someone refused to help, so they are selfish. Someone disagreed with us, so they probably don’t understand what we are talking about.

And that more or less settles it.

Of course, we are not always wrong. Our experiences help us recognise certain patterns, and intuition can be quite accurate. It is hard to imagine a life in which we had to analyse everything other people do from scratch every time. We probably wouldn’t even have time for our morning coffee.

The problem begins when we stop distinguishing between what we actually know about another person and what we have filled in ourselves.

We see behaviour, but intentions usually remain invisible to us. We may know the circumstances and still not know which of them mattered most to that person. Our mind, however, is not fond of such gaps. It connects the available information, draws on earlier experiences and offers an interpretation that often sounds so convincing that, a moment later, we forget it is only one possibility among many.

Interestingly, the more convinced we are that we have read a situation correctly, the less reason we see to ask any questions.

Why would we ask, when we already know?

I wonder how many conversations never happened because one person decided they already knew the answer. How often have we attributed intentions to someone that they never had, or interpreted their silence as indifference without knowing what was happening in their life at the time?

And how often have we found ourselves on the other side of such a story, trying to explain to someone that the reality was different?

There is something particularly frustrating about it. After all, we don’t always expect the other person to agree with us. Sometimes we would simply like them to try to find out how we see the situation before passing a final judgement.

That doesn’t seem like such an unreasonable expectation. Yet it can be surprisingly difficult to meet.

I think one reason is our attachment to our own interpretations. Once we decide we know why someone behaved in a certain way, we often start reading new information through the lens of that belief.

If I believe someone doesn’t respect me, their being late can become further proof of that lack of respect. If I am convinced someone is selfish, even a perfectly reasonable refusal can only reinforce my opinion.

And when that person tries to explain, I may treat their words as excuses.

In this way, our interpretation begins to supply its own confirmation. And we have to admit that we can be really good at it. Especially when we are convinced of our own perceptiveness.:)))

But our attachment to our interpretations sometimes has another, less obvious dimension. Sometimes we need that interpretation for something.

If I decide that someone treated me badly, I may feel anger, disappointment or hurt. My interpretation helps me make sense of the experience. I know what happened and why I feel this way.

And if I tried to truly understand that person’s perspective, I might discover that the situation is more complicated. Perhaps they didn’t know something that seemed obvious to me. Perhaps they had reasons I hadn’t considered. Or perhaps my own behaviour also played a part in what happened.

None of these possibilities necessarily means that my feelings were unjustified. But it might mean changing the story I had already told myself.

And we don’t always feel like doing that.

Sometimes it is easier to hold on to the belief that we understand the situation well than to let in information that might shake that certainty.

I find the way this mechanism works in close relationships particularly interesting.

We can spend twenty years with someone and be absolutely convinced that we know them inside out. We know what they like, what they can’t stand, how they respond to stress and what they will say when we bring up a certain subject again. Sometimes we can even finish their sentences.

Yet the longer we know someone, the easier it becomes to forget that there is still something about them we don’t know.

People change, after all. They have new experiences, reconsider their beliefs and discover needs they were not previously aware of. We are not exactly the same people we were five or ten years ago either.

And yet our ideas about those closest to us can be astonishingly resistant to updates.

Someone who avoided conflict for years may, at some point, begin to speak about their needs. A person who was always ready to help may learn to say no. But if we still see them through the lens of their old role, their new behaviour may seem incomprehensible, or even wrong.

“But that’s not who you are.”

Or perhaps that is precisely who they are becoming?

This may be one of the more paradoxical aspects of closeness. We can know someone’s history, remember hundreds of shared moments and still fail to notice that the person in front of us no longer fits our existing idea of them.

What’s more, we sometimes make it harder for them to step out of that role. When someone behaves differently from what we expected, we try to restore the familiar order. We remind them of how they have always been, or look for reasons why they have suddenly become “unlike themselves”.

As though we knew better than they did who they should be.

And I wonder how many changes in our close relationships go unnoticed simply because we are so attached to an earlier version of the other person.

This is where I begin to see the particular value of curiosity.

I don’t mean asking endless questions or constantly analysing other people’s motives. The curiosity I have in mind is more a willingness to acknowledge that my knowledge of another person may be incomplete. I can have my own observations, experiences and perfectly justified conclusions, and still leave a little room for something I don’t yet know.

It sounds simple, but in practice it requires a certain flexibility. Especially when someone behaves in a way that disappoints or angers us.

In those moments, it is easy to mistake curiosity for making excuses.

Yet we can try to understand why someone acted in a certain way and still believe that what they did was wrong. We can hear their perspective and decide we don’t want to continue the relationship.

There are also situations in which we already know enough to set a boundary. If someone repeatedly hurts us, we don’t have to keep having conversations in search of ever deeper understanding.

Genuine curiosity does not require us to give up our own needs or ignore what we see.

But when there is room for a conversation, something may happen that neither person anticipated.

We may hear a story we didn’t know. See a situation from a perspective we hadn’t considered. Sometimes discover that our interpretations were only partly right.

And we don’t have to reach agreement for such a conversation to matter.

After all, we sometimes talk to someone who sees the world completely differently and still feel that we have genuinely met. Not because we managed to persuade them to agree with us, but because we were truly interested in what they had to say.

We can also spend an entire afternoon with someone, exchange plenty of information and even agree on many things, and leave feeling that we haven’t really met at all.

Perhaps because, throughout the conversation, we were relating mainly to our own ideas about one another.

I think curiosity is a form of respect for the other person’s separate existence. When we truly listen to someone, we acknowledge that not everything about them belongs within our knowledge and interpretations. We allow them to tell us about themselves, rather than simply fitting them into a story we have already created.

This does not guarantee closeness. The other person may not want to talk, may be unable to explain their motives or may simply not be interested in that kind of encounter. Contact, after all, requires both people to take part.

But where that willingness exists, we can see a person who cannot be confined to our ideas of them once and for all. Even if we have known them for years, they can still surprise us.

Because another person does not stop changing simply because we have already formed an idea of who they are.

And perhaps one of the simplest ways to truly meet them is sometimes to admit:

“I don’t know if I understand you correctly. Tell me more.”