Arguments are unavoidable, right? Arguments are necessary, right? Arguments solve problems, right? Arguments are about information, right? Arguments are ways to find truth, right? Arguments are good for us, right? Wrong on all counts.

Arguments are not necessary and they are never good for us. Let me explain

What is an argument?

An argument is a discussion that includes two vastly different elements: information and emotion. We think thar arguments are about information. I believe this and you believe that. I see this piece of information and you see something else. We are looking for truth, right? Wrong. We are looking to win the argument. Information is only one of the two ingredients of an argument. The other is emotion. Consider the arguments you have been in over the years, whether with your spouse, friend, parent, or child. Note that as the argument went on, often from bad to worse, the emotion was particularly obvious, and often painful. You certainly know that “no one wins an argument.”

A professor once spouted, “Don’t confuse me with the facts. My mind is already made up. I just want to rearrange my prejudices.” Or, as the adage goes, “Convince a man against his will and he will be of the same opinion still.” There is so much truth to these statements. So, if an argument is made up of both information and emotion, is there a way to separate these two elements? Yes, but it is very challenging to do so. Simply put, you can express emotion or you can express information, but if you do both, you will have an argument.

Emotion

Our business is largely around helping people understand emotion, first their own emotion, and then other people’s emotion. The basic problem with understanding emotion is that the English language, to say nothing of the American culture, does not help us develop a grasp of this central ingredient that all humans have. The Stoics, like Epictetus, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius thought the only way to have a successful life was to avoid emotion entirely. This is not possible. I either express my emotion or I don’t but I always feel some kind of emotion. You can read the several blogs we have on the various aspects of emotion, or you can read our book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel to read about how we help people understand, express, and communicate their emotions, and then learn to do hear other people’s emotions.

This is no easy task. It would seem easy to just “say how you feel,” but such is not the case.

We understand there to be four basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger. We also believe that all emotions are expressions of love in some way. Because most of the difficulties we have in life have a large emotional component, we make reference to the “love problems” that we all have in our daily lives. Let me explain:

• Anger: I am angry at the guy who just pulled two inches in front of me on the interstate. I am angry, right? And then I might say something out loud, or maybe in private, or I might do something, like honk my horn or use a familiar hand sign. Actually, I have a “love problem” in this situation. What is the love problem? It is this: I am driving, hoping to get to my destination in a timely and safe manner. Simply put, I’d love to get to where I’m going in one piece and on time. This guy interrupts my trajectory. I have lost the thing I loved, namely getting to where I’m going. OK, this isn’t a grant love like for country or spouse, but it is love, nevertheless. And if you realize that it is a love problem, you will be able to deal more effectively with your emotions than carrying this feeling into your encounter at your destination. More, later when we deal with experiencing and expressing emotions.
• Fear: I am afraid that I will not get that job that I was hoping for. This fear is another “love problem” if you look at it carefully. Here’s the deal: I would love to have this job. I might not get this job, which would be a big disappointment. More importantly, if I don’t get this job, I will lose something that I love. What is that? I would lose the job that I love. All fears (with the tiny exception of true danger in a dark alley hearing a gunshot) are love problems. Think about it: when you are afraid of something, you are afraid of something that you love. Perhaps, this is something you already have, like a good job or a good spouse, but you are afraid of losing this thing (job, spouse, etc.) that you love.
• Sadness: Sadness is also a love problem. How’ that? You love something; you lose something; you get sad. What is the “something”? Could be a person, a pen, a proposal, or a particularly important opportunity. When you lose something, you definitely have a love problem because grieving is always about something that you love. This something that you have lost could be an inanimate object like a pen or even an idea. Note something or someone you have lost. Perhaps, today, perhaps 20 years ago. Think about this person. You will come to tears. These tears are the result of your having lost something that you love. You might pick up our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, that we wrote a while back for a fuller explanation about the value of sadness.
• Joy: This the last of the four basic emotions that we talk about in our books and every day in our offices with people who struggle in life. When we love something, and we have this something, we experience joy, namely joy in the having. We can be overjoyed when a political candidate wins an election. You can be overjoyed when you finally buy the car you have wanted all your life. So, what, you must think, is a “love problem” associated with joy? For instance, you might be overjoyed buying a car but by the time you get home you have “buyer’s remorse,” wishing you hadn’t bought the car. If you truly love someone, you will be joyful in this person’s presence, or even in the memory of this person. But it is possible to love this person “to a fault”, which means that you are happy only when you are with your friend/lover. So, the love problems associated with joy are caused by feeling so much joy in having that you can’t do without having, whether that “having” is a person or a car.

Enough about emotions. What about the other half of an argument? Information.

Information

This is the easiest part of the avoiding arguments. As stated, rarely do people actually have a real discussion or debate about anything because their emotions have been encrusted into the information.

Information…that is…real information is not, by itself emotional. A fact is a fact, which is much different from emotion. As we stated, an argument occurs when you mix emotion with information, which happens…well…all the time. But let’s stick with information for the moment and look at it a bit more carefully. Information comes in several forms:

• Facts. However easy it seems to identify facts, it is, in fact, not so easy. Before Columbus (actually, several other people who are less notable), most people took it as a fact that the world was flat. Now, most people believe the world is round. I suppose we could debate this fact, because most of us have not been in outer space to actually see the roundedness of the world. Many other facts are just as stable as the world being round. We might all agree that we humans are all born; that is, we are not hatched. That is pretty much a given fact. It seems reasonable, factual, to say that all we humans will die. And as Ben Franklin said, “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” We, the living, can’t be assured that we will die, but it seems likely that we will and it seems silly to think that we won’t die. Even on these seemingly absolute facts, like living and dying, could be debated, which leads us to realize that all facts are debatable, that nothing is so factual as to be absolutely factual.
• Ideas. Ideas are facts that are not in the emotional realm and they are not in the realm of physical objects, like cars and people. An idea might be “wrong” but it is still a fact in that the person believing it takes it as a fact.
• Theories. Theories are like ideas in that they are ways we look at the world. Most people now accept a Darwinian understanding of evolution, but as you know, there are many people who don’t. In fact, both believers in evolution and believers in creation have ideas that we might call facts.
• Numbers. I was a math major until I got into advanced math classes where there were no numbers, just letters that represented numbers. Aside from my failure to understand this kind of math, we can say that one jar is one jar, two jars are two jars, and so on. The fact that there are one, two, or 20,000 jars suggests that we can count the number of jars and arrive at an exact fact. However, when we try to put words to these numbers…
• Representations. Numbers that we assign to jars, like one or two represent the number of jars. Representations are facts in the secondary case, i.e. representing some other fact.

Take note of the fact that you had some kind of emotion when you were reading this last paragraph about facts. This will bring us to our main point: it is impossible to look at facts without some kind of emotion attached. Perhaps, you are a math major and understand that numbers and letters are more than numbers or letters. Or, you may believe in evolution or creation wholeheartedly and had some emotion when you considered that someone might not share your understanding of facts. This could lead to an argument.

A discussion or debate is about the facts. If emotion is not a part of it, the two people are both looking for the truth, which they can find by looking at all the facts. If (and usually when) emotion comes into a discussion/debate, the person who feels emotional about something must admit to it, which then should stop the discussion immediately in order to allow the emotions to run their need to feel and express feelings.

Arguments

As stated, arguments are a combination of emotion and information. More importantly, the element of information in an argument is about 10%, while the amount of emotion in an argument is about 90%. You know, you say of your friend, parent, child, or partner some form of, “I can never win an argument.” If you’re male, this is particularly true because women are, by and large, better at using words to express their emotion. We men tend to use anger, avoidance, or addiction, all of which are based in an anxiety that is fear-based, and certainly not fact-based.

Actually, women don’t “win the arguments” any more than the men do because when men go into one of the “three A’s” (anger, avoidance, and addiction), the woman actually loses the argument because she has lost the man.

To avoid arguments, you must do the nearly impossible: separate emotion from information. But the hardest part of this is to separate the information from the emotion. To do that, you have to be able to be emotional and allow yourself to be emotional. Just emotional. What does this mean: joy, sorrow, fear, and anger? That is what it means. In other words, you need to feel through the emotion that has infiltrated into the discussion of facts and give this emotion “room” by itself, not connected to facts. You will be able to give time for a factual debate and discussion only if you do not have lingering emotion in the discussion. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that people actually have a fact-based discussion.

Giving room for emotion

Giving emotion a wide berth can be done only if both parties agree that one party needs time and opportunity to “just feel”. Rarely does this happen because when a person expresses emotion, the person will feel and say things that are emotionally true, but perhaps not factually true. How do you do this? Consider a scenario where both people are aware of the centrality of emotion in an argument and wants to feel that emotion to its full extent so you can have a rational discussion of the facts:

• Sam: Mary, I have some deep emotion that is associated with a disagreement that we have and would like your indulgence to hear me out knowing that what I say might sound “overly emotional” and most likely not factually true.” I will do my best to stay with feelings but I can’t promise you that I won’t say something that is outrageous, irritating to you, or even dead wrong. I just know that I need to feel these things, and ideally say them to you with the hope that you will understand me better, and perhaps that I will understand myself better in the process.
• Mary: Sam, it would be my pleasure to hear what you feel. I will do my best to keep quiet and just listen. Say anything you like. I won’t hold it against you, and I won’t bring it up at another time because you have said that you just want to express your feelings, and we both know that expressing feelings is never perfect because there are no words that do exact justice to any feeling. Go ahead.
• Sam: Here we go. (I could imagine any number of things that Sam might say that would be largely emotional. He could be jealous of her attention to some man; he could be upset about Mary’s wanting to buy a new refrigerator; he could be upset because his boss criticized him in some way. Read our book, Balls, and our earlier book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, for real-life examples of emotional expressions.
• Mary: Sam, thank you for sharing your feelings. I am sorry for what I (they, she, he) have done to you. Perhaps you can tell me more about what happened (what I did, what they did, etc.) before we stop for the day.
• Sam: I do have a couple more thoughts. No, they’re not thoughts. There obviously feelings. (Sam goes on to say more things that may sound crazy or dead wrong), and then he says that he is finished.
• Mary: Again, Sam, thank you for telling me your feelings. This is good for me to hear from you, and I hope I have been a good listener.

Can you imagine such a scene? Have you ever been Sam? Have you ever been Mary? Probably both, but likely you were not the Sam and Mary we have in this scenario. What is happening is this: Sam is courageously saying how he feels without fear of rejection, correction, or hearing Mary’s feelings. Mary is lovingly hearing “crazy” things from Sam knowing that he isn’t crazy but that he has never said such things to anyone.

This is an emotional time. Not a discussion time, not a debate time, and not an argument. If Sam and Mary can weather the storm of Sam’s feelings, it is likely that Mary would need to do the same, i.e. express her feelings with Sam patiently. If they do this right, they might be able to launch into a discussion and/or debate about the facts. Interestingly, however, they may actually not need to have the information-based discussion because when they express, communicate, and hear real feelings, the information piece is no longer a debate.

Arguments with children

I just had a conversation with a mother about her 14-year-old son who “never admits that he is wrong, never apologizes” which can lead to “a three-hour argument,” which is never resolved by any kind of compromise or harmony. Mom said that she simply has to walk away, often with her son chasing after her insisting that she agrees with him. I hear this from most parents of difficult children. “Difficult children,” by the way, are often quite bright. As noted above, you might find it valuable to read our blog on the “4-8-12” child, where we discuss how some children are 8-years old physically, 12-years old intellectually but 4-years old emotionally.

This mom is not the only parent who reports “arguing” with their children, sometimes these children being four or five. My response to all of these parents is the title of this blog: never argue.  This is extremely hard for parents to do, especially for mothers who want to have harmony with their child, or for fathers who simply get mad at the child. To “never argue” with a child or adolescent is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the statement remains: never argue.

“Never argue” is possible and very desirable, but it is very hard to achieve. I hope you can consider separating emotion from fact in order to listen to each other, love each other, and jointly find the truth.