Our emotions drive us, whether we like it or not. Logic and reason always seem to take a back seat to anger, resentment, or jealousy. Unfortunately, we often fail to realize this, and never to good effect.
About a year ago, I bought a brand new stainless steel grill. I absolutely love it. It makes wonderful burgers, grills chicken like a champ, and cooks steaks good enough to may Bobby Flay jealous. Well, it does all those things when I don’t mess up.
A couple of weeks after buying the grill, I opened the refrigerator to find a plastic tub full of raw, marinating chicken. My roommate at the time had bought this chicken, and was clearly planning on grilling it. I gave it a sniff, and thought it smelled a bit off. Whether it was really the chicken, or just the marinade, I couldn’t say. But I knew I had to let him know. How would I feel if I let him eat bad chicken? What if he got salmonella? Or e. coli? Or a cold sore? I could have prevented that!
So, out of only the most genuine concern for my roommate’s health and safety, I asked him how long the chicken had been marinading. “A few days.” I told him that I didn’t think it would really be safe to eat chicken that had been sitting uncooked for that long, even in the refrigerator. He blew me off, but then checked online, where other people also told him that three days is a bit too long. (Everyone knows that random Internet sites are trustworthy sources of information.) He ended up throwing the chicken out and eating something else.
This isn’t the story of how I saved him from certain salmonella, though. I don’t honestly know whether or not the chicken was safe to eat. As long as he cooked it thoroughly, it probably would have been fine. Upon later reflection, I realized that my concern for his health was not the primary reason I asked about the chicken, not by a long shot. The real reason was that I knew he was planning on using my grill. How dare he?! If he’d asked, I wouldn’t have minded, at least not much. He was going to use without asking, though, the bastard.
My roommate using my grill, even without permission, would not have been the end of the world. But I let my emotions get the better of me, and I did so without even realizing. Rather than recognizing that I felt insulted by him neglecting to ask for permission, and acting properly, I turned to a passive-aggressive technique to get him to not use my grill. The appropriate thing to do would have been to let him use my grill, but to tell him that in the future, he should ask before planning to use it. By not recognizing my own emotions and how they were affecting me, I let myself act in a way I normally wouldn’t. By neglecting to step back and evaluate the situation, I allowed myself to ignore the real issue.
Acting the way I did didn’t cause any massive problems. I don’t know if my roommate ever even realized the real reason I asked him about the chicken. It’s not the end of the world if he did. It could have caused problems, though, if he’d seen through it and he’d gotten upset. Two passive-aggressive people do not a happy home make. Acting the way I did is fairly transparent. Behaving that way repeatedly will eventually be noticed, and it can’t possibly breed anything but bad feelings.
What would have happened if it had been a boss that had slighted me? Would I have started neglecting my duties at work? Would I have become passive-aggressive there? That could have been a problem.
Inevitably, everyone we know is going to hurt our feelings at some point. If we don’t step back, and realize what the problem is, we greatly increase the chances of the situation escalating, perhaps immediately, perhaps over the long term. How many friends have you drifted apart from because some minor, possibly even unintentional insult turned into a big deal? (Hint: If you have bad feelings toward someone you drifted apart from, and can’t fully explain the feeling, that might be what happened.)
How many couples split because tiny issues built until they were driven apart? Sally feels that John just doesn’t care anymore, and John thinks that Sally’s turned into a nag. Likely, neither of them has really changed much. Instead, they’ve let the little things build up. They’ve let the feelings of resentment build. John has been shirking his part of the household work and he doesn’t take Sally out much anymore. Sally has been acting distant because John hasn’t been doing his housework, and she doesn’t realize her tactics are not helping the situation. Neither of them are showing much affection. Both Sally and John need to step back and realize that there’s no critical problem. They’ve simply let tiny things build until they’ve convince themselves that the problems are huge.
However, if we take the time and put forth the effort to just step back and really figure out why we are acting the way we are, we can often fix the underlying problem. We don’t have to compound minor issues. Sometimes we need to work through the problem with the others involved. Sometimes we just need to understand why we’re upset, or why we’re acting the way we are, and just stop. Once we understand the problem, it can more often than not be easily solved. We just have to try. We have to pay attention, look past the superficial issue, to find out what’s really underneath.
February 9th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Maybe I’ve missed something subtle in the context of your post or maybe I’m just flat-out in disagreement with you.
Given the situation you found yourself in (the indication that your room-mate was about to use your grill pan) I don’t feel it unreasonable to take steps, to ensure that he didn’t use your grill.
Sure if you had been nasty and said “hey, I saw the chicken in the fridge, hope you weren’t intending to use my grill pan, pal” then that would be wrong and of course damaging to your relationship.
However I don’t think it’s unreasonable to approach the situation with the overall goal of ensuring he didn’t use the pan as long as you broached the subject in a polite and respectful way… and to me you got extra marks for ’softening’ the point by mis-directing the issue towards his health.
Instead you seemed to suggest that you should have capitulated, let him use the grill and then say something afterwards. I guess I can kind of see how that is a tad softer, but it seems unnecessary.
You’re adult guys - if I was the room-mate I’d much prefer you were more direct with me and would hope we already had a relationship where you could actually say “look, I just bought this grill pan, it means a lot to me so I hope you understand that I’m not going to put in into the general pool of our shared cooking pans”.
I don’t think I’ve missed a finer point here, I guess I am just disagreeing with you. I think you can treat people with too much kid gloves, and then it becomes difficult to ever directly take them up on an issue because it becomes so out-of-character.
In closing, I’m also just wondering why you didn’t want your pan used? Maybe ultimately this is the route of the issue - if you live in shared accommodation it is very difficult to bring things into the communal living space and define them as ‘off limits’ - esp if it’s not a consumable like food or drink.
(I like your writing, I see you’ve just started so do keep up the blog!)
February 9th, 2007 at 2:18 am
I mostly agree with the above comment. It sounds like you handled the situation tactfully. You might not like your motives, but your actions were effective and polite.
Obviously, though, the issue isn’t over.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Derek Ben u2 should flatshare and perhaps work towards a grill share thru lengthy correspondence
February 9th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Gee you guys,
ah sho do ‘ppreciate all dis free publicity!!
February 9th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Ben, my main problem wasn’t really that he intended to use the grill. It was that he didn’t ask. I get testy when people don’t ask to use my things, and that’s the part I wished I’d handled better. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with saying “no, I’d rather you didn’t use that”, nor do I think there’s anything wrong with getting upset the way I did.
I just wish that instead of taking a slightly dishonest route to getting him to not use the grill, that I’d instead just told him that I was upset, and that he should have asked. That would have (or could have) fixed the underlying issue, whereas the route I took did nothing to actually solve the problem. It just postponed it.
Also, it doesn’t matter much to the discussion, but just for clarification, the grill is actually an outdoor, standalone grill. Maybe “barbeque grill” would have been less ambiguous.
February 9th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
LOL. I had no clue you had an issue with me using your grill. In fact, it never even occurred to me that it might have been an issue. I mean, it’s a grill. Grilling things on it is what it’s for.
Then again, that probably points to a personal failing of mine for making assumptions about other people’s stuff.
Also, the USDA website saying to use fresh chicken with 1 to 2 days is a lot more authoritative than your opinion, no offense intended. I figured that neither one of us were really experts on salmonella growth rates.
February 9th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
PS - Nice blog. Keep it up. :)
February 13th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
You should punch your fat roommate in his dumb face.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Actually, my roommate was neither fat nor dumb. You seem a little upset, though. I’d suggest that you look into some anger management techniques.
February 20th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Okay, I saw this post after reading your post about the Secret and it’s a great example of my point that the Secret isn’t instant magic, but results in a series of events leading to your goal.
You did not want your roommate to use your grill. You wanted to prevent it. Your conscious/unconscious motive was to stop him from using your grill. If you believe in the Secret then the universe, in combination with your actions, would prevent your roommate from using your grill. You brought up the idea that the chicken could be bad. Roommate verifies this and does not use the grill.
End goal achieved. Ulterior motives are rooted in your desires, what you think about a lot. Therefore your actions are influenced by those motives — essentially the Secret in action.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Dan, that’s all true except that the universe didn’t perform any magic to get my roommate to stop using the grill. Yes, my desire was involved, but only because it pushed me to take action.
If I’d desired for him to not use my grill, but then bit my tongue and sulked in my room, he probably would have used my grill, and I’d be one of the many people who just can’t understand why the law of attraction just doesn’t work for me, when The Secret (and so many new age sources), say that it does work, and then pitch it as if it were magic.