#tryagainlater

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I had a problem with some office technology. I’d run a credit card through the reader and nothing at all would happen. It was as if it was either unable or unwilling to recognize that I was doing something. No matter how many times I’d run and rerun the card, nothing. This was tremendously frustrating. It was as if my actions were irrelevant to the machine. I spoke sharply to it; I pushed all sorts of buttons. I turned the card over and around repeatedly. Nothing. It was as if the machine were determined to ignore or defeat me.

Finally, I remembered some technology wisdom I’d been taught — if nothing you’re doing is working, unplug the offending machine, wait a minute, then plug it back in and let its little brain reboot. This trick works a remarkable amount of the time and has saved many machines from premature disposal.

So I unplugged, waited a little while, replugged, and allowed the machine to reboot while I waited (more or less patiently). The credit card reader now worked perfectly. Hooray! I didn’t need to know why it wasn’t acknowledging me before. I had just needed to wait and try again later.

Sometimes people are a lot like machines. A person can get stuck for some reason and be unable to process input. It can be because of fatigue, or illness, or being in a situation that provokes intense emotional reactivity. These can be times when yelling, pushing (emotional) buttons, coming at things from a different angle or with different words all may be fruitless. This can be very frustrating, especially with a partner. You can feel that you have become irrelevant to someone who has become impervious to your most persistent efforts to communicate something important to you.

Frustration doesn’t tend to make most of us more patient or more creative or more sympathetic. And often our increased pushing just makes things worse, if only by confirming our failure to make an impression. We may try to speak more loudly, hoping that yelling will make the desired response occur. (This often provokes retreat.) We may speak in small but biting words, hoping to render the information so basic that even a caveman could understand it. (This tends to be experienced as insulting and produce either defense or matching offense.) We may even try calmly and gently looking for other ways to couch the communication. If this last one doesn’t work, it may be a sign that the partner is for the time being inaccessible; and that no matter how well you do your part, it won’t be, can’t be, successful.

So what to do? Unplug and reboot.

If you’re convinced that you aren’t having any effect, or any positive effect, on the interaction, it may be time to pull the plug. Take a time out. Calmly walk away from this pointless interaction and come back together later, when the circumstances have become more propitious. Perhaps the time will be right after the other person has had a chance to change clothes after work, or after a good night’s sleep, or after the crisis at work has been resolved, or after a hungry partner has eaten. Whatever the driving force that has made your partner inaccessible, even if you have no idea what it might be, give it time to clear the circuits. Work from the presumption that your partner will want to participate when he or she reasonably can do so.

Then, reboot. Reintroduce the conversation. Bring up whatever it was that you were trying to discuss before. If it’s like my credit card reader, trying again after the reboot required no clever understanding on my part, just a willingness to try again later. It is thoroughly possible that your partner needed time and opportunity to become psychologically reorganized, just like my technology needed the opportunity to get its electrons reorganized. After the reorganization, my reader was, and your partner may be, fully responsive again.