What are we looking for when we try to convince someone?

How often do we find ourselves talking at length, trying to explain our reasons? We return to the other person’s behaviour, weigh it up, judge it, repeat our points, insist. We lose energy. As the conversation goes on, the distance grows.

Beneath our arguments, we may notice something we struggle to say. The other person’s “I disagree” may reach us as “you don’t trust me”, “you don’t believe what I’ve experienced”, “what I think doesn’t matter to you”. And when the other person shows disappointment at our position, we may experience it as though staying close to them meant giving up what we ourselves have seen and felt. Perhaps they aren’t asking us to give up anything: that is how we are experiencing it. Yet, in that moment, we may feel our freedom to express our experience is under threat.

So we end up defending ourselves, each for fear of losing something.

In other conversations, we may find that we can go a little deeper. We set aside, at least for a moment, the need to convince the other person and share what we have felt. We listen to how they experienced the same situation and sometimes discover a perspective we hadn’t imagined. We don’t necessarily reach a shared version of events. But something can happen that has a sweeter fragrance than agreement: for a moment, we speak without having to defend everything about ourselves. In that space, we can feel less alone.

A moment like that, though, doesn’t depend only on us. We can reveal a wound and not be heard. We also need to ask whom we are opening up to, and how much room that relationship offers for what we bring to it.

In Who can afford not to reach an agreement?, Giorgio Marzocchi and Pier Luigi Lattuada lead us to consider this, too: an agreement can bring a dispute to an end without rebuilding a relationship. And when one side can afford to wait and the other cannot, someone may accept a proposal they do not consider fair.

It is between these two possibilities — being able to draw closer and finding that, this time, we cannot — that the question of love can begin.

In When he stopped calling me Andrea, Andrea Tripodi describes asking the consul about the relationship between language and belonging. When the consul stops calling him “Andrea” and switches to the formal “Dottor Tripodi”, Andrea feels that the conversation has come to an end. Shortly afterwards, the ambassador discusses the same question with him without endorsing his interpretation. Andrea now also acknowledges his own need to be recognised; this does not erase the difference between the two encounters, or the weight of their roles in the first. Today he would be more careful about whom he entrusted with his inner life.

In I can understand you without agreeing with you, Anissa Boschetti manages to stay alongside a friend who feels hurt, while experiencing the events differently herself. She listens to her friend without setting aside her own perception; she also notices her own rush to restore harmony. Something remains unresolved between them, yet they keep talking.

Perhaps the transition from Conflict to Love begins right here. When we ask “Do you agree with me?”, we are sometimes also asking: “If you think differently from me, can you still see me?” And when we are the ones who disagree, can we stay connected without setting aside what we feel?

As we approach the next issue of Emozioni, devoted to Love, we wonder whether this word can be contained within a definition.
For now, the invitation is to observe moments like these: when the desire to be understood is confused with the desire to be right; when we can say “I felt hurt” and listen to how the other person experienced the same situation; when, instead, we recognise a limit and need some distance to protect who we are.

How can we distinguish the fear of not being seen from a relationship in which there really is no room for us?

And what if our need to be seen sometimes keeps us from seeing the other person?