Hurting the One You Love

One of the more popular old tunes in the American songbook is "You Always Hurt the One You Love" by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts. The great Mills Brothers as much as anyone helped popularize it.  This song came to mind recently while reading Jared Diamond's latest book, "The World Until Yesterday." In it, Diamond, one of my academic heroes, refers to a study by Lewis Richardson conducted over 50 years ago about the causes of the nation-against-nation wars between 1820 and 1949. It seems many of those terrible conflicts during that 129-year stretch involved nations that were trading partners. In other words, nations that had formed partnerships to strengthen their economic bases experienced so severe of a breakdown in communication they actually went to war with an ally.

These nations were not strangers to one another. Their armed conflicts were not due to a lack of information or ignorance one had of the other.  Such an occurrence is not all that different when it involves a couple that marries. Two individuals form a legally-binding partnership based, at least in large part, on feelings of the heart. They wed with the notion this alliance will enhance their lives. Unfortunately, according to statistics from the federal government, approximately half of those same marriages end in divorce. Some of them, at least, are very bitter separations in which one or both parties are so disillusioned with the other they want to do more than simply leave the other - they want to do harm to them as well.

As the old saying goes, nothing lasts forever. Trade agreements between nations and marriages are no exception. The question then becomes: what happens that turns such positive beginnings between nations and individuals into such negative endings? How much of a role does poor communication play in this sharp turnaround? While I do not have a precise answer to that question, what does strike me upon initial reflection is how powerful communcation - good or bad - is. On the one hand, when it works it makes one want to connect with another for a long long time. When it doesn't, it can inspire those same partners to initite steps to destroy the other. It goes to show how effective communication is not something to be ignored.