Goldilocks Sharing: The Art of Balanced Communication

Language is perhaps the most important invention in the history of humanity. It permeates everything we do; it is the means of every interaction we have, and the medium of how we relate to one another. We use language to share our ideas, hopes, fears, and dreams. It’s how we convey our stories, our values, and our legacies — and the way we immortalize them, passing to future generations.

Each of us uses language in a unique way, that is to say, we all have our own ways of communicating. Language may give us a common, well…language to verbalize our thoughts to one another, but the ways we use it are as unqiue as our own personalities and experiences. Everyone has a different preference, an emotional temperature that is neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right for them.

As we learn and grow in life, we develop relationships through communication. Familial, friendship, romantic, business, etc — all relationships are built with a foundation of shared ideas, framed in the words, ideas, and values we express to one another. And just as every person’s communication style is unique, so too must be the communication of each of our relationships. You’ll never have the exact same conversation, exactly the same way, with two different people (especially so if one or both of you are neurodiverse). A one-size-fits-all approach is never going to work for everyone, or for every relationship you have.

The single constant in all of this is you.

You control the dials of how much you listen, how much you talk, and what about (or write, or read, or whatever). You tune in to a relationship just like a radio channel, and adjust the dials accordingly until everything is coming in clear — or if it isn’t, you’ll only catch some of what the otehr person is trying to say, and vice-versa. An old-timey metaphor, I know. If you’re too young to know what a radio is, just imagine a big speaker box that streams podcasts and music, but you only have so many choices, and sometimes need to fiddle with dials or the wifi will be spotty.

All this is to say that relationships require a balance of communication — and finding and maintaining it can take a lot of time and effort. Take myself and my partner, for example. While we generally communicate well, we both have some hangups that create thorny areas of communication. She has trouble expressing some negative emotions, which leads to her holding things in sometimes. I’m the opposite; a chronic oversharer who struggles to not verbalize every thought that comes out of my head with someone I trust. Oh, and both of us have a form of ADHD and are prone to anxiety, which sometimes leads to fun conversations that usually go something like:

Me: “Are you okay? You seem off.”

Her: “I’m fine.”

Me: “You sure?”

Her: “yeah”

2 minutes later…

Me: “You sure you’re fine?”

Her (exasperated): “Yeeeesss, I’m just tired!”

This is the kind of thing that happens when my oversensitivity gets the best of me, or an intrusive thought takes over and I start wondering if she’s being quiet because she’s upset with me. Most of the time, there’s nothing wrong at all. Every once in awhile, there is something bothering her, but it’s not something she wanted to share at the time — either because she doesn’t want to bug me with something she considers small, or because she’s still mulling things over. In any case, the conversation usually ends with both of us apologizing, for some reason.

In case you can’t tell, that’s an example of not great communication on my part — the equivalent of putting a scalding bowl of oatmeal in front of my partner and expecting her to eat it. Because I know she doesn’t like to share as much as I do, and yet I assume she’s holding back something when there’s usually nothing. And even when there is something, I do her a disservice by trying to drag it out of her, instead of letting her come to me if and when she’s ready. I’m not entitled to every thought she has, nor is it healthy to expect it.

On the other side of the neurotic coin, there’s undersharing. While I normally have a harder time not verbalizing my thoughts (I have been known to give entire impromtu TED talks in our living room), when I know a subject is sore or likely triggering, I’ll avoid it like the plague. This is fine if there’s no reason to bring it up, or if the setting isn’t appropriate — a common saying goes “There are two things you should never discuss at the dinner table: Religion and Politics.”

In fairness, I’m not sure this saying was quite so widespread outside of middle-class, pre-2016 white people, but still.

But avoiding a topic because it is potentially upsetting doesn’t help to solve problems, if there are any.

Here’s a different example: Back in the hazy days of early 2020, I decided to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign over the internet with some friends to keep up communication and make the pandemic lockdown easier to bear. I had a group of people in mind who all had similar interests, most of which knew each other already. But one friend asked if he could include someone else. “Sure, the more the merrier!” I thought, and told him as much.

Within a month of playing, I started to notice some problems. The new person made odd decisions in game; their character often separated from the group, causing me to split my focus and dragging out gameplay. Or they would speak or act in a way that undermined one or another member of the party. They always communicated with me, the Game Master, their rationale for doing these things — often in a convoluted way, but to the rest of the players, they were completely out of sync with the rest of the party more often than not.

As this was the first long-form campaign I’d ever run, I had my hands full, and I tried to ignore the disruptions that the new player’s choices were causing. I didn’t want to upset them, or risk a falling-out with our mutual friend by confronting them about it. Metaphorically, I was reading the paper, ignoring a stone-cold bowl of oatmeal and hoping it would spontaneously heat itself to an edible temperature while I wasn’t looking.

As you can probably guess, that didn’t happen.

Soon enough, I started getting complaints from my other players. At least one noted repeated instances where the new player’s character had acted directly to undermine them in a way that felt personal. It was making them feel like they couldn’t play the game they wanted. At this point I knew that I couldn’t put off talking to the new player any further. Even so, I sugar-coated my words with them, bending over backwards to avoid sounding accusatory. Whether it was because of my lukewarm warning, or the new player’s personality, the behavior stopped only briefly. When it returned, the tension in the group was at a boiling point, and seemed ready to boil over.

And so, finally, I swallowed my anxieties. I ended up kicking the new player — though I still tried to do it as politely as possible — and the tension evaporated. Everyone was finally on the same page, and the game became much more enjoyable. Had I spoken up sooner, I could have saved a great deal of frustration all around, but the lesson was learned in the end.

Through experiences like these, I learned (and often re-learned) to both check myself before I overshare, and to not hold back when I become aware of a genuine issue. Finding the balance, the just right level of communication was critical to moving forward. As I noted at the top, that level will vary from person to person, relationship to relationship. But with some effort (and good faith/trust on the part of everyone involved), that balance can always be struck.