Communication is everything

Communication isn't a panacea, but you can't solve much of anything without it

The thesis of this post is so boring that it feels ridiculous to even bother writing it. But bear with me, because I think it’s actually important to say.

It’s this: communication is really important.

It’s not quite the case that anything is possible with good communication and nothing is possible without it. But it’s honestly not far off.

Communication is often mistaken for weakness

There is a tendency to dismiss ‘communication’ in some circles as an insufficient response to fundamental disagreements. In some cases, people will even argue that the impulse to promote better communication ends up enabling bad behavior.

For example: the partner who doesn’t value your time or you as a person needs ultimatums and boundaries, not talk therapy. Or the malicious person in your life doesn’t deserve your engagement.

The premise underlying this is that ‘communication’ is weak, and roughly a synonym for ‘accommodation.’ Promoting communication is therefore seen as a defensive relationship trait. The partner who is trying to communicate is ceding territory to the other subject—moving toward them without imposing a reciprocal demand that they move toward you. By that logic, communication is basically just surrender.

A slightly friendlier theory of communication holds that it’s mostly about transmitting information. You use communication to inform other people about your feelings, needs, or interests. While this is less negative than the communication = weakness model, it’s still extraordinarily limited. If the best that you can hope for with communication is a better understanding of interests, you will often still founder on basic mismatched objectives. Basically, if your partner is a jerk who doesn’t value you as a person, better understanding won’t produce a healthier relationship because the problem is with the underlying values themselves, not with how they are being transmitted.

However, I reject these ideas. Communication is not simply a passive process of accepting viewpoints that deny your agency, nor is it a matter of sharing of information. Each of this is so denuded conceptually that it’s unhelpful to call them communication at all.

Communication is a process of collaborative meaning-making

Communication isn’t a process of two isolated individuals printing out factsheets about their needs, then grimacing and checking off as many demands as they can bring themselves to accommodate. It’s not just hearing the other person’s point of view. Communication means coming to an understanding of how and why different parties feel what they feel, and then grasping how this implicates your own values and interests. And crucially, good communication is a process of meaning-making that produces new concepts and values that did not previously exist.

To communicate with someone, you have to fuse horizons (to borrow a metaphor from the great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer). Doing this doesn’t mean giving up your own sense of self entirely, but it does require letting loose from the certainty of your own position. When you begin to truly understand another, you start to see yourself through their eyes and gain a new vantage point that is neither strictly your own or their’s.¹

This necessarily entails vulnerability because it decenters your own sense of self. And when this process goes awry, it can indeed be dangerous. But the danger isn’t really in the act of communication so much as it’s an inherent danger of existing in a social world, where other people contribute to our sense of self. And even when you encounter a bad actor—someone who expects you to shift your horizons toward them without any reciprocal movement on their own part—it’s enormously helpful to understand that what they are doing is refusing to communicate. Which is to say: they are choosing the path of weakness, closing themselves off from both the danger and the magic of intersubjectivity.

In some cases, that is a reason to end the relationship. Someone who is unable to communicate cannot serve as a coproductive partner. But in other cases, identifying this as a limitation can actually help to diagnose the problem, and create pathways toward better engagement. And generally, people who think that they aren’t interested in communication actually just don’t have enough experience with how rewarding and life-affirming it can actually be.

So none of this is meant to suggest that ‘communication’ can fix all problems, or that the right answer is always to trying to talk through every problem. Quite the opposite. Cultivating good communication means being able to distinguish between insurmountable and permeable barriers, and accepting that these create different circumstances.

In this, it’s just important to recognize that communication is strength, not weakness. The person with the agency in this context is the one who can diagnose and respond to real conditions. The weak approach is to stay closed off, huddled in a corner, afraid of exposing yourself to another point of view.

Communication alone won’t fix structural problems, but you can’t fix structural problems without communication

I have tried to push back against the idea that ‘communication’ or ‘compassion’ in any way equates to ‘accommodate and settle.’ That idea stems from a mistaken theory about conversational risk. Communication isn’t an erasure but an expansion. By communicating, two finite individuals become something greater than they were alone, in large part through a new perception of the larger structural impositions that might otherwise drive them away from the space of shared understanding.

Communication is not a tool for solving individual problems. You do not ‘reach agreement’ through communication. Instead, by communicating, you perform the relationship. This is an ongoing, permanent process, which can never fully settle because it requires us to occupy two incompatible spaces. First, we have to preserve our sense of self as a stable referent from which to engage. This is our ‘horizon’ from which we perceive the relationship. Second, we have to shift that horizon by moving toward our partner. Because these two objectives are always in some degree of conflict, communication is the process of continual essay, revision, return, and re-engagement.

In practice, this means that communication is a framework in which ‘interests’ are shaped, through which feelings can grow and develop. We are not isolated agents who possess fully exogenous desires bouncing off each other like billiard balls on a table. We are collaborative beings who engage the world in new ways through the process of communication.

This is a superpower. It’s what gives us the ability to obtain new perspectives on irresolvable problems, to sometimes discover solutions that might otherwise have been impossible, or sometimes to discover that the problem isn’t really a problem at all. There’s no guarantee, of course. Sometimes, maybe even often, you engage with people who are not interested in communicating. And sometimes, even if you have good communication, you discover that there really are structural incongruities that make further close collaboration impossible.

For example, if one partner wants kids and the other doesn’t, communication might never change the basic incompatibility. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value in communication! In fact, it’s very important in that context. Coming to a reasonable and compassionate understanding of a relationship incompatibility sets you up for moving in new directions. Even if that means breaking up, there’s a world of difference between vituperative breakups based on failure to see the other person clearly and empathetic breakups in which both partners celebrate what was while acknowledging that it no longer fits their needs.

1. Jürgen Habermas offers a theory of communicative action which has been adapted into an interpersonal model of communication in some interesting ways, and which matches some of the dialectical flavor I’m offering here.