At the end of the day-Work Intimacy

People use expletives to describe their work or school day. (if you let the kid, that is).

So they must be trying to tell us something.

When the day isn't all that good some of us want to out-source it, dump it, purge. Others just want to forget about it. And when it's good, some of us don't mind bragging, blabbing on about the good things that happened, RIGHT AWAY. Yet others sit and wait to be asked, and if the question never happens, well, they don't share.

Doesn't matter what we do during those waking hours. We could sell cars, drill teeth, study bugs or bring them home, whatever a person does with time, many people, even kids, like to talk at the end of the day and there are those of us who don't want to utter word one.

If we're lucky and our verbal skills get better and better as life gets more and more complicated,, some of us want to talk more and more. Maybe not everyone, but enough of us get into this CAN'T WAIT TO TELL YOU place that one of the big couples therapy beefs in my office is: YOU WON'T LET ME GET A WORD IN EDGEWISE, THAT'S WHY I DON'T TALK, another variation of it's all about you.

Maybe it's a basic human need to want to talk about our day, especially if it was a particulary good or bad day. I should think especially with the bad ones.

Why? When you talk about something bad, you lose at least some of it, maybe just a tiny piece, maybe all of it. You drop it off, you give it to the person you've told it to. It's a gift, of sorts

I will thank people for sharing in therapy. But mean it. I mean it. I'm not saying, THANKS FOR SHARING sarcastically. I feel it's a gift when someone trusts me enough to tell me things, even if one of the covert rules of the relationship is that they're paying me to listen.

When you're in a relationship—that can be any relationship—friendship, sib-ship, parent-child, spouse-spouse, lover-lover—boss-employee-if you've got that talky-sharing thing going, if you have something built in, then you're really lucky. There is another person who ostensibly is willing to listen to you(for free, how cool is that?)

So if you're in a relationship, then what's the problem?

Sharing should be a two-way deal but it often isn't. Let's stick with living-in, married or significant other relationships for a minute.

A person comes home, someone's already there, so one of them might begin to talk and the other has to inhale it. The other might have something HUGE to say, something that he or she wants to say. Or might want NO WORDS AT ALL at that moment. Pretty soon they're either fighting a covert fight over who gets to talk or one of them isn't listening and wishes the noise would kindly end.

There's a lot to be said for winding down differently at the end of the day. If what your partner needs to do is change clothes, work out, watch TV or eat in silence, then there's something to be said for that. Finding the balance, obviously, is the ticket.

You can't allow so much psychological space that you feel all alone in a relationship. When you're lonely and living with someone else the whole emotional unavailability issue comes up. My cousin the psychologist and rabbi, Peter Rosenzweig, wrote a book, Married and Alone, that you should read.

But all we're talking about here is waiting an hour before the sharing begins.

And here's the relationship lesson your mother never taught you. Try to be second in a relationship when it comes to dialogue. It's probably impossible, of course, to always completely sublimate your need to communicate to your partner's (or your friend's) but it is a virtual guarantee that if you do, that your partner will learn to sublimate his or hers. At some point you'll discuss it, too. If you are both mature enough, you may get to the point where you have a polite power struggle about who HAS to go first.

There's an old joke about social workers and why they never get home from a conference. They're all in a conference hall and there's one door, and they're all ready to file through, and one is saying, YOU FIRST, but the others are saying, NO, YOU FIRST, NO YOU FIRST, etc. It's funny, and it's about being co-dependent (some say) but it's really a nice way to be.

And sublimating that desire to talk first is the best way to build one of the five kinds of intimacy, work or schoolintimacy.

One more thing that I have to get off my chest. The acid test of your work (academic, if you're in school) intimacy is how much you know about the significant people in your lives.

If I were to be sitting with you at a wedding, or a graduation, or something like that, and I said, So what does you spouse/partner/significant other/brother/sister/father/mother do/study? You shouldn't have to say, I don't know.

Copyright 2006, TherapyDoc