What we have hear is a failure to communicate

I was just talking to a friend of mine and told him...

The funniest thing I ever heard Jeff Foxworthy say was regarding the communication gap between men and women. He noted that the same words, depending on who was saying them / hearing them, meant very different things:

For instance, if a man and a woman are out to dinner and the woman says to the man,"I'm not wearing any underwear." Well, you know what he's thinking..."I'm getting some tonight!"

But, if the man says to the woman,"I'm not wearing any underwear." She's thinking,"Oh great! I'm going to have to wash those pants three times!"

I've often said that things usually aren't funny when we can't relate, funny when we can, and not funny at all if we can relate too much.

So in taking the funniness out of this, I began to think about out current state of things in out culture and began to consider that perhaps a good deal of our problems might stem from our messages, how they're communicated and how we interpret them.

The joke above was funny sure, but it also shows something to us about ourselves if we go a little deeper. That is regardless of what it it's we are saying, most often people have a tendency to hear what they choose because they tend to consider the message in itself less than how that message relates to them.

That seems pretty natural if we consider that the other person is surely telling us something that applies to us or why would they feel the need to communicate it at all, right?

But I wonder of anything would change at all if instead of rebuttle or offense for how we may perceive the message applying to us, we first considered that what it's being said is a communication meant to tell us more about the other person and what they are thinking about themselves.

It seems pretty self centered to think that just because something may be applicable to you must mean that it's about you, right?

Just thinking...
d(-_-)b