When two people have a problem, there’s the problem itself, and there’s the road it travels. In my second book I put the second part in one line: “You go inside to resolve. You go outside to dissolve.”
To resolve something is to settle it, to find an answer both people can live with. To dissolve something is to break it down until it comes apart. A problem taken to the person it’s about can be resolved. A problem taken around that person, to people outside the relationship, tends to dissolve the relationship instead.
The four routes
A problem between two people tends to travel one of four ways.
- Face to face. You bring it to the person it’s about. It can be loud or uncomfortable, but it arrives, so it can be answered. This is the inside route.
- Venting. General complaining about life, with no intimate information in it. It lets some pressure out, but it doesn’t settle anything, because the one person who could answer it isn’t in the room. The book also points out that venting tends to refill the tank rather than empty it.
- Leaking intimate information. Telling someone outside the relationship what belongs only to the two of you.
- Recruitment. Asking the listener to take a side or do something. “Help me. Take my side.”
The first route goes inside. The other three go outside, and they get more damaging as you go down the list. The reason is simple, and the book puts it this way: “nothing can resolve where it never arrives. You can’t answer a charge you don’t hear, and you can’t fix a problem nobody brought to you.”
Intimate information
The word I use for what leaks out of a marriage is “intimate.” Here is how the book defines it:
Intimate information: “private information a couple agreed to keep between them when they entered the covenant of marriage, emotional or physical. Your conversations, your finances, your sex life, the moments you share, and anything that happens between you, good or bad. If you’d hesitate to say it with your spouse in the conversation, it’s intimate.”
Giving that away to someone outside the marriage is a form of betrayal, because it hands over something that belongs to both of you. And emotional intimacy given outside can do as much damage as physical. The book draws one more line about it: “Confessed, a leak is a mistake. Hidden, it’s a betrayal.”
Who counts as a third party
A third party is anyone the two of you haven’t mutually agreed on, along with family and friends who may take a side. That’s where recruitment goes looking. As I wrote, “The fairness loop always needs a judge, and recruitment goes shopping for one.” It lays out the case in a court where the other side can’t show up. And it often works for a while, because the listener’s sympathy is real. It just got pointed.
That’s why I say, “You can’t resolve anything through a third party.” Book 1 gives the boundary that guards against it: “Don’t say anything behind my back you wouldn’t say to my face.”
There are two important exceptions.
A counselor you both agreed on isn’t a third party. A pastor, a mediator, a therapist, or a couples class that both people chose is part of the inside route, not a way around it. The difference is that both of you are in it, and the help is aimed at resolving the problem, not winning the case.
Real abuse is different. If you are being abused, or you are not safe, going outside for help is the right thing to do. That isn’t a leak or recruitment. Reach out to a licensed counselor, a domestic violence hotline, or your local emergency services. Safety comes first.
The book also offers a test for the gray areas: does the help ever come back to the person it’s about? Help that’s headed back to the source, to face it, to fix it, or to set a boundary, is just help. Help that only ever builds a case behind someone’s back is recruitment.
Why the route matters
This doesn’t mean that face to face settles every problem. Some it won’t. But the route a problem takes tends to decide what’s possible. Taken inside, even a hard conversation leaves something both people can work with. Taken outside, the problem tends to grow, the other person never gets a chance to answer, and the relationship slowly comes apart in rooms they can’t walk into.
How you deal with your own situation depends on the relationship you have. What the routes show is where each road tends to lead.
This article is education, not treatment or advice for any one situation.
These ideas come from my second book, We Love What We Value: Why the Victim Can’t, and How Self-Respect Ends It, available now, mostly Chapter 14, “The Claim and the Debt.” The boundary against talking behind someone’s back comes from my first book, Relational Mechanics, available now.
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