Blast from the past: Gossip

This evening in Sangha we talked about gossip and I suddenly remembered a habit from early in my marriage with Wife.

It didn't start out that way. But for our Dharma study, we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. Then as we began to discuss them, someone (maybe I can call her Annie, in case she needs a name) commented that she had a problem with the Ninth Training.* Specifically, it's not that she thinks there is anything wrong with the behavior that it recommends—"We will … [refrain] from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence …. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure"—but that she has a lot of trouble living up to it. Fundamentally, she enjoys gossip! She added that she doesn't really know why she likes it so much, but there it is. It's just a fact of life that she has to deal with.

Of course I had (and have) no idea why in particular she enjoys gossip, and I didn't pretend otherwise. But the whole conversation put me in mind of the early years of my marriage to Wife. So when it came around to my turn, here's the story I told the Sangha.

Back when Wife and I were in the early years of our marriage—after her gall-bladder had been removed,** after we had left graduate school, after we both had stable jobs—we fell into a habit of talking about our friends over dinner. And mostly the common theme seemed to be to criticize them (in absentia) for their poor life-choices, or for not handling their various predicaments as well as we would. Quite often we'd shake our heads condescendingly at the pickle that this-or-that friend had gotten into by not being as clear-headed about his-or-her choices as we would have been.

It took me a long time even to recognize that this pattern had developed. Then I thought about it for a while before deciding that I wasn't really comfortable with it. Once I decided that, I had to figure out what to do about it. And only slowly did I figure out to try to redirect the conversation elsewhere whenever I detected this topic in the offing. All in all, it took me way too long to get there.

But why did we do it? That's the question that might have helped Annie this evening, if only I'd had an answer. When I told the story tonight, I suggested that maybe we were both really insecure about our own life-choices, so we wanted to reassure each other that at least we made better choices than those other people. More generally, Wife always craved reassurance that she was the Smartest Person in the Room: this need was a symptom of her clawing insecurity (or narcissism, if you prefer to spell it that way). And on my side, I hadn't gotten to the point yet of being disgusted*** by that kind of flattering reassurance, so of course I too found it gratifying.

Anyway, it's a simple story and a pathetic one. But I found myself telling it tonight, and it's only fair that you hear it too.    

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* You can find the full text of the Ninth Mindfulness Training in this post here, as well as in the Plum Village link above. No, we don't always end up discussing this exact same precept whenever we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings—which is every other month—but it's kind of amazing that we have now done so twice in a row.

** See this post or this one. 

*** "Disgusted" isn't the sign of any great moral achievement on my side. It's just that I've come to find that flattery tastes like syrup. And I don't care what kind of sweet tooth you might have, but it's a simple fact that no-one can choke down a whole bottle of syrup at one go.