Do you keep your agreements?

“What difference does it make anyway?” was the defiant and churlish retort from my son when he turned up forty-five minutes late one morning to pick up the family dog that he had told me he was going to pick up the night before.

I took a deep breath and did my best to retain zen-like composure.

“Be like water” were the words I heard in my head.

“What the hell do you mean, what difference does it make?!” were the much less zen-like words that came tumbling out of my mouth, lathered in spit-enriched indignation.

My son loudly pointed out that I was still unshowered, wearing unmatched pyjamas and displaying the remains of my makeup from the day before, all of which was unarguably true. The point of his irritatingly accurate observations was that yes, he was late but I clearly wasn’t ready to go anywhere.

So, what difference did it make that he was late?

In the grand scheme of things, none. He was right. In the grand scheme of things, it made no difference that he was late.

And yet I was enraged.

His tardiness felt disrespectful. It felt inconsiderate. It made my heart race and my jaw clench.

And this is where you, dear reader, may be saying “Jeez woman, get over yourself. He’s a 19-year-old man-child for goodness sake! What did you expect? Plus, what is the big deal? Nobody died.”

The rational part of me is nodding resignedly in agreement with your admonitions. You’re right, it was not worth getting bent out of shape about.

And yet, the reality was, I was all bent out of shape.

A large part of this banal domestic friction was a ‘me’ problem, the short fuse I need to keep working on to neutralise in myself. But there is also a bit of a ‘him’ problem in the equation.

Bear with me, I’m not trying to exonerate myself from blame by deflecting fault onto him.

The truth of the matter - and the reason I calmed myself down very quickly - is that it would be unfair and disingenuous of me to recriminate him too severely for being late when I think it likely that there is a dimension of the ‘him’ problem that he inherited from me and his dad: a learned pattern of behaviour that comes from unarticulated expectations and results in unkept agreements.

Assumptions, Expectations and the Arguments in Between

Over the years, I have realised that most of the arguments, discord, hurt, and disappointment that we experience with other people are the result of never putting words on what we expect from them. We make tacit assumptions that our intentions are clear, that our desired outcomes are obvious, and that our motivations and logic are unneeding of out-loud explanation.

We assume that the people in our lives know what we want from them and why we want it. We assume that they’re totally on board with accommodating our personal schedule of desiderata. Perhaps most importantly – and most vexingly - we assume that they care to the same degree about what we care about.

If only that were true.

What is true is that I never explained in a calm, clear, unequivocal way to my son why I expect him to turn up on time and why it is important to me from both a here-and-now practical and a meta-emotional perspective. I never put words on what his helping me out represents for me and what his being late says to me - rightly or wrongly - about where I rank in his hierarchy of priorities.

It is so obvious to me, that I made the cardinal error of assuming that it is blindingly obvious to him.

For me, his being on time was assumed to be a given; like it is axiomatic in life that a ‘good’ son will turn up on time to accommodate his mother.

However, it turns out that for my son it is axiomatic in life that a 'good' mother will forgive a son pretty much anything. So, it doesn’t matter that he preferred to play Fortnite with his mates the night before and snag an extra 45 minutes in bed the morning after rather than keep his agreement with said mother about turning up at a set time.

“What difference does it make?”

What I have learned is that the answer to that question depends very much on who you are in the conversation and the time horizon under consideration.

Taken as an isolated occurrence, the short-term net-net of the situation with my son was no more than some unnecessarily raised voices, a slammed door and some mumbled obscenities. All avoidable had we both shown some better emotional regulation but flawed humans we are, so it is what it is.

However, endowed with the wisdom of my many mistakes, it’s actually the longer-term repercussions of these interactions that interest me much more. Knowing what I know about the relational friction I have experienced so far in my life, I dearly want my son to become aware of this behavioural pattern so that he can address it early, if he chooses, and learn his way out of it through intention, practice, and trial and error

"The way we do anything is the way we do everything." - Martha Beck

In addition to being a significant energy drain for the person who repeatedly doesn’t keep their agreements – all those little white lies and arguments add up and their aggregate weight becomes oppressive for the bearer – the effect on the person experiencing the let-down of the broken agreement is similarly damaging.

They start to trust a little less. Resentment sets in. The first tell-tale symptoms of contempt begin to fester. Where the benefit of the doubt might previously have been extended, there is now a veiled assumption of ill will due to a deficit of consideration exercised iteratively and recurrently, in small doses, over time.

This is what relationship death by a thousand cuts looks like, be it with a friend, an intimate partner, or a colleague. With blood relatives, especially parent-child relationships, it’s a bit different because the fabric of those relationships is more resistant by design. But there’s still an avoidable, abrasive impact.

Having played much of my life on 'hard mode' when it wasn't called for, I am doing my best to teach my kids the two sides to this critical relationship dynamic: the art of articulating our expectations so that the people around us on whom we have dependencies understand what we want from them and why it is important to us; and the art of being impeccable in honouring the agreements we make by only making those agreements to which we are truly committed.

"Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.” - Marian Wright Edelman

This means learning to say ‘no’ upfront and negotiating in the moment a mutually acceptable path through any resulting friction when the probability is high that our subsequent behaviour will show on our behalf that we were actually saying ‘no’ even when our mouths said ‘yes’.

It means learning to embrace the discomfort of establishing boundaries by using our words so that it becomes crystal clear what we can reasonably expect from the people in our lives, and the levels of behaviour that we are reasonably committing to consistently deliver to them in a self-renewing see-saw of reciprocity.

It means acknowledging that broken agreements do make a difference, no matter how small the transgression might seem on the surface.

If our behaviour gets someone upset, there’s a reason. And if we care about the relationship with the person in question, we should also care enough to wonder why they're upset and endeavour to be better in respecting our agreements with them, if indeed we have broken one.

Remember, “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology.

It would be so much better not to have that fruitless argument in the first place.

Friend, believe me when I say it can make a world of difference. And possibly a whole lot more of a difference than you currently realise.

?AJ