Ruth Ashby is a resident of Lincoln.
When you live with someone, it doesn’t take long to discover that you may disagree with them on a number of different subjects. What takes longer to discover are the reasons why you might disagree. Often, we may think that our partner was raised differently. Maybe we blame their gender, sometimes thinking, “Isn’t that just like a woman?” or “Leave it to a man to do it that way!”
If you live with someone long enough, though, you start to realize that some of your differences can’t be helped. All of us gather information from our surroundings using our senses, but what you might not realize is that none of us sense things in the same way. We are all familiar with some of the more blatant sensing differences, such as color blindness or hearing loss, but what about the more subtle differences? I have known a lot of men who, when asked about the color of a certain object, use only the basic eight colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black) to describe it. Something is “blue” no matter what its shade of blue. Women, on the other hand, prefer to use more descriptive and discriminating terms. Something is royal blue, hunter green, bluish-green, tan, sand-colored, chartreuse, etc., when most women describe colors.
What took me 50 years of my life to learn was that our senses of smell differ drastically. Some things I can smell when my partner doesn’t, and vice versa. Burning scented candles always smells like smoke to me, which puts me in a panic. Fire! What’s burning?! My partner can smell onion breath a mile away but not garlic. For me, it’s the other way around. Just the slightest whiff of mold sends me searching for the bleach to eradicate the culprit, while my partner never smells a thing. Some flowers have scents to me that are pleasant, others have no scent, and still others are downright offensive, and of course, they are usually opposite from my partner. You get the idea. We all smell different things, and when we smell the same things, we smell them differently. I find it interesting that we tend to choose partners whose senses are diametrically different from our own, as if our chances of survival and success are better when our two sets of senses are all encompassing of what is out there for us to sense.
Even knowing this, it took me another 10 years to realize that it’s not just our senses of sight and smell that are different. All of our senses work differently. One of you is hot when the other is cold and vice versa. One likes spicy food, and the other likes bland. We all know the old party game of starting a rumor and passing it around a group of people by whispering it into the next person’s ear. By the time the rumor gets to the end of the line, it usually bears no resemblance to the original whisper. Admit it! We all think that someone must have changed the rumor on purpose, but what if that isn’t what is happening? What if my ears pick up certain sounds and yours pick up sounds that are different from what I hear? Again, this would be another excellent survival adaptation passed down from our cave-dwelling ancestors.
I was recently shocked to discover a hearing difference that I still can’t explain. Our washing machine has a little jingle it plays when it finishes a load of laundry. This is a series of notes that I always mimic at a wash’s end by singing out, “Bee bop bee boo, bee bop bee boo.” To my surprise, one day, my partner said, “The least you can do is get it right.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. It goes ‘boo boo bee, boo boo bee, di bop.’”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
So, the two of us stood next to the washing machine the next time it was finishing a load of laundry and listened closely. “Did you hear that? It went ‘bee bop bee.’”
“No. It went ‘boo boo bee.’”
Now, you tell me: How is it possible for two people to listen to the exact same selection of notes played in the exact same way each time and hear vastly different tunes? Is it any wonder that “reality” means different things to different people? Perhaps we should be wondering how we ever manage to get along together at all when everything in our lives is understood from such disparate sensual input. So, the next time your partner says or does something exasperating, just remember that the two of you really do approach life from completely different worlds, and that’s a good thing. It helps humankind survive.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
