You Speak In Metaphors—But Your Partner Takes You Literally
Communication When You're Abstract And They're Concrete
Welcome to Love Notes For Real Life! This is my space away from the noise of social media to dive deep into all the tricky, nuanced relationship topics you're struggling and puzzling over. Yes, it's a paid newsletter, but I promise it's worth it! Don't wait to snag your membership...the price is going up at the end of July, but you can lock in a forever rate of $5 a month by upgrading now! I hope you join the party!
If you're a verbal processor, you may also be someone who accesses and expresses emotion through not exactly literal speech. When you want your partner to understand how you're feeling, you use evocative, descriptive language.
Perhaps you use a lot of metaphors ("You're breaking my heart" or "It feels like you don't care about me and are stomping all over me"). Or you may liberally sprinkle vivid adjectives into your descriptions of factual situations. Alternately, you might talk a lot about how your partner's actions feel to you—not what they are, but what they feel like. You speak for underlying meaning and emphasis, not just literality.
Abstract, emotionally vivid, or symbolic speech is not any better or worse than concrete speech. But when your partner doesn't relate to language the way you do, you can end up snagged.
They may get hung up on how you're exaggerating or inaccurately portraying them. They may think you're dramatizing or milking a situation to make a point, attack them, or "win" because your language doesn't map onto the events they've just experienced. And that hurts, because it's far from the truth. You are using words to make a window so they can see you, the inside experience you're having. And it feels like (simile incoming) they're slamming that window shut in your face.
In today's Love Note, I'm exploring how you can hold onto your innate, vibrant way of expressing yourself while also giving your partner some solid ground to stand on.
Shall we?