Native Tongues
Someone I know is contemplating a trip overseas. Her proposed itinerary through Ireland and Scotland will call for a great deal of planning and preparation. Food, lodging, and the vagaries of the weather are some of the factors that must be taken into account in putting together the trip. Thankfully, the one thing she does not have to worry about is language.
We all feel more comfortable with people who speak our native tongue.
Maybe that’s why we’re instinctively drawn to those who feel, and sound, similar to us. “We speak the same language.” “We can almost finish each other’s sentences!” There’s something comfortable about hearing your own voice reflected in the voices of others.
But as we go through life, and especially when we choose our partners for life, it often comes as a surprise that those who speak our language are not necessarily the ones with whom we get along best. Being too much alike can lead to problems.
If two people are both driven and competitive, they will probably clash. If both are introverted, they may never learn how to communicate. Ditto for two individuals who are both inveterate procrastinators, timid socializers, and so on. By and large, we grow through dealing with differences. By coping with dissimilarities, we become bigger people. After all, there’s nothing very growth-promoting about looking at oneself in mirror.
When seeking out a life partner, you naturally look for someone who’s on the same page in terms of hashkafos and life goals. Beyond that, there’s nothing wrong with choosing a person who complements rather than reflects you. And that doesn’t mean looking for someone who’s superficially different but basically just like you. If the primary difference between two people is nothing more than a matter of variations in accent, they may get on swimmingly together on a rather shallow level… but will there be maximum growth?
“I’m not interested in growth,” you may mutter. “I just want peace in the home.”
Peace is a great prize. The greatest! But it can be all too easily confused with apathy or stagnation. A flat, dead pond may look peaceful, but there’s nothing alive swimming around in there. Nothing to rock the boat in ways that will challenge your skills and improve your sailing.
There’s nothing like the rich, well-earned peace that comes from working things through together. From listening carefully to someone who doesn’t use the same lexicon as you.
From learning to speak each other’s language.
This Means That
One of the major pitfalls that a young couple just starting out together will face is the “This Means That” syndrome. Hubby makes a remark to his new wife that he thinks is innocuous. In some cases, he may even mean it as a compliment. Imagine his dismay when his wife bursts into tears!
The young man’s comment was grounded in the emotional language his nuclear family spoke, and the communication skills he saw growing up. These will naturally be different from what his wife experienced. Or perhaps there was not much emotional language in his childhood home at all, and communications skills were weak to non-existent.
Our devastated wife is reacting to what his remark would have meant in her family’s dictionary. Or maybe there was no emotional lexicon in the home she grew up in. Perhaps she, too, was given few tools with which to navigate the language barrier of marriage.
Given these realities, the hurdle of a vibrant and growth-oriented marriage is for the couple to learn how to ask questions… and to listen well enough to the answers to be able to create a new language of their own. One they both understand. One that will not only not be a stumbling block but will actually enrich the relationship.
To be sure, the language of relationships goes far beyond the merely verbal. How we do everything is a reflection of our emotional lexicon.
Take the word “leisure,” for example. For him, a family vacation means chilling; for her, it means non-stop action. How can they enjoy their time together if they don’t even speak the same language?
For him, Shabbos and yom tov meals are an opportunity to change gears, slow down, touch base with the people at his table. He likes to take his time between courses and converse at length on a variety of topics—leaving his wife fretting about food growing cold or the children’s nap schedules.
In her childhood home, the motto might have been “moving right along.” Courses were brought out in quick succession, zemiros sung with brisk efficiency and naptime considered sacred.
What’s a couple to do?
Good Intentions
Suppose she is easily inspired, easily moved to tears, easily swept away by a good Hashgochah Pratis story… while he’s a hard-boiled rationalist who demands a good sevorah before he commits to an idea. Her conversation may feel insipid to him, while his may feel cold-blooded to her.
Why doesn’t he cry more?
Why doesn’t she think more?
There’s nothing wrong with either of them. They are simply speaking two different languages.
Language barriers exist in any social circle. Among friends, social gaffes are inevitable when a person doesn’t pause to consider how her words may sound to someone else.
Imagine a well-meaning woman telling a whole series of beautiful “happy ever after” shidduch stories to some older singles or divorcees. She’s obviously hoping to inspire them to renewed hope for their own happy endings. Unfortunately, each tale may feel instead like a twisting of the knife. Instead of latching onto the hope, they bleed from the comparison to their own bleak situations.
She’s speaking one language, and her audience is hearing another. Her inspiration is their pain.
What’s to be done?
One solution, you’d think, would be to simply confine your social interactions to people who are just like you. People of your own age, financial status, family situation, and so on. If you all speak a common tongue, you’ll never find yourself floundering in the shoals of miscommunication, right?
Wrong. No two people can ever be exactly alike, even when raised in the same family, let alone in a whole different one. Also, when it comes to communication, differences in personality can be just as problematic as differences in background. My friendly ebullience can grate on your ears as too raucous and unrefined. Your discernment may strike me as too critical. His focus on details may appear to her plodding and tedious, while her spontaneity strikes him as irresponsible.
And so on, down the spectrum of personality traits. No matter how close we may be, no two native tongues are exactly alike.
Besides, even if you were correct in thinking that people just like you will speak the exact same language… is that really the optimum way to go through life? How about expanding your horizons a bit? Interacting with people who speak a different “language” than you do offers a way to acquire breadth of vision that you won’t find by clinging only to the familiar. And that goes a hundred times more for marriage!
Coping with variations in emotional dialect, with the tiny nuances that mean different things to each of them, forces a couple to learn a new language. To dig deep inside themselves to find a kernel of caring and compassion, even when the going is rough. To listen. To adapt. To grow.
Of course, it’s far more comfortable to surround ourselves with mirror images of ourselves, or as close to it that we can get. But comfortable can get boring. I’d like to hypothesize that life is much more interesting when we embrace differences and learn to stretch from them.
There’s someone near you whose native tongue may seem mysterious but whom you’d like to get to know better. So go ahead… learn a new language!
