Essence of Being in a Box

This has been an interesting month. My children bought a condo and moved out leaving me with the opportunity to restructure my house and my life. I had a contractor put a floor in my garage so that I could move my office out there. It was a struggle because he insisted on telling me that I didn’t want what I wanted.

Bottom line, I got a real lesson in male passive aggression. He put in the wood floor but it isn’t flat and it isn’t level. His comment to me was that he gave me what I wanted.

Now, I am not the kind of woman that takes something like that lying down. My “You can’t get me.” attitude rose to the occasion. I fired him. So now I have the real dilemma and that is getting someone to look at it and agree to repair the work that has been done without it costing me more than three times what it started out to be.

Here is where the thinking inside the box comes in. Every contractor or carpenter with whom I have discussed this problem, tells me we have to tear it up and start over and they start talking about joists and underlay and laying a new cement floor and so forth. They all seem to have their rules about how it has to be done.

Perhaps my original contractor was the most creative of the bunch, he just didn’t take it far enough. Or it could be that I am a woman and totally unrealistic about the whole job. Maybe I should have described it as putting in a wood carpet over the cement floor instead of putting in a wood floor.

How does this relate to relationships?

It seems that men and women do speak different languages and have different ways of thinking and communicating. I didn’t think it was necessary to tell a contractor that I wanted my floor to be flat and level. I sort of thought that was a definition of floor.

My feminine logic went something like this.

My house and garage were built in 1923.
I may tear this garage down and rebuild it in a few years.
I can use this as a temporary location for my office.
I want the room to feel warm and comfortable.
Two inch thick wood provides strength, insulation, and warmth.
I don’t need fine, expensive, hardwood flooring in the garage.
An inexpensive solution to all of the above would be a pine or fir, deck type floor that I can finish with varethane and cover with a small area rug.
Thus it would accomplish many things with one stroke.

The male contractor train of thought from what I can understand went something like this.

She doesn’t really know what it takes to build a wood floor.
I can do vinyl easier than wood and it will look better.
She is insisting on wood like the deck. Building a deck will make it too high.
She said she doesn’t want it to be hardwood or parquet, but rough finish is okay.
I have to seal it and secure it so I’ll use both glue and cement nails.
If rough is okay then it doesn’t need to be flat and level.
I gave her what she wants and she’s still not satisfied.

This whole scenario is a metaphor for how relationship communication can go awry. So what is the answer? I am supposed to be an expert at this and look at the mess I have created. Hopefully, husbands or boyfriends are not as dispensable as contractors.
The assumptions that we can make from this are as follows:
There will be misunderstanding.
Men will go straight to solutions.
Women will have different ideas about how to do things.
Sometimes there will be messes.

Ultimately it is the mess we have to address. How to clean all of this up. Both parties have to be willing to listen to each other and accept the other’s point of view.
The goal is to create a solution acceptable to both parties.
There cannot be judgments and accusations on either part.

When it comes to couples having differences, these are the ground rules that work for negotiations. When you have a couple who are angry, not getting their needs met and wondering how they got into such a mess in the first place, this is the strategy for reconciliation.

Have a withhold session, a controlled conversation, monitored by a neutral party where each party gets to speak about the things that are bothering him or her. As one party speaks the other may only listen with full attention and respond only by saying thank you. Usually each one gets to speak from 2 to 3 minutes on each topic. Then switch roles and repeat. Responding to any statement is not allowed. The purpose is to get all feelings heard and acknowledged.