Can We Live Without Misunderstanding?

Recently, a friend who visited me told me how a mutual friend of ours fell out with another mutual friend of ours due to how the latter reacted to a request for financial assistance from him. The request, made via a Facebook Messenger chat, was for his mum’s medical expenses and to which this friend of his replied by calling his attention to the fact he was in the habit of reaching out to him only when he was in need of help. This young man took offence and called the bluff of his friend. He saw the response as a ridiculing insult and has been bent on maintaining a cold war with this friend of his. I was informed the charge against him was true as evident from the records of his chats with his friend over the months.

Not even the fact that the requested money was eventually sent directly to his sick mother would move him to change his hostile resolve. Besides, this friend of his, generous to his bone marrow, has since then continued to give financial assistance to the woman as he had always done even before the said fall-out. He has been showing gratitude to a woman who sometimes was the saviour to him and his friends when lack of money made feeding difficult during the chequered days of undergraduate schooling.

However, the aggrieved fellow saw no reason to cease his hostility. The generous gestures of his friend to him and the mother over the years were not enough to persuade him to act otherwise. I was told he even swore not to personally inform the friend of his imminent wedding. “He will see the invitation on my WhatsApp status, I don’t care,” he was quoted as saying

This cold war brewing between these two friends obviously stems from the well-known tendency of we humans to see things more from its negative side. We tend to pay more attention and react more to something that appears to us as negative than we would do towards things we perceive as positive. We are slow to appreciate the good in others and are also brief in doing so; but on the contrary, we are very quick in observing what we consider bad or does not sit well with us, and we tend to dwell on it for so long. Oftentimes when we receive favour from people, it’s only a few-worded phrase of gratitude – “thank you,” “I’m grateful,” or “God bless you.” But when we feel offended by people, the reaction is not this brief and surfacial. We would usually whine, complain, blame, curse or even fight. The reaction endures and may even continue for days, weeks, months or even years. The folly of human.

The reason for this sort of reaction (or overreaction) is that we tend to take it as given that people ought to be good towards us. We take it for granted that people should show kindness, loyalty and sincerity to us, and refusing to appreciate that human imperfection means that every person is capable of both positive and negative behaviour. We all are under the constant pull of positive and negative forces, and while societal morals expect us to always yield only to the positive pulls, succumbing to the opposite cannot be ruled out for as long as we remain humans.

We all are guilty of not living in line with this reality. Our expectations of others are usually one-sided – we only expect to see the positive side of others, even though we ourselves aren’t perfect creatures. Because of this expectation, we feel deeply disappointed and aggrieved when the opposite occurs, which makes us to tend to overreact.

It is for the above reason that we see relationships built over many years suddenly get crashing just as a result of one moment of misunderstanding. The parties would, in one moment of madness, jettison the memory of long years of shared love and mutual favours, choosing to dwell on a one-off instance of negativity or perceived negativity.

Back to the question raised at the beginning: can we live without misunderstandings? The answer is a strong no, for misunderstandings are always likely for as long as we are mortals. However, there is no doubt that we’re capable of managing such moments of toxic energy to prevent it from mutating to a more calamitous outcome. And one crucial factor here is how we perceive and judge others. If we continue to dwell more on what we perceive as negative about others, we would be nurturing negative energies more than we nurture positive ones, meaning that misunderstandings will more likely prevail over love and friendship.

This is my meditation this midweek.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.