Let’s start with a simple question. What’s the opposite of “love”?

If you answered “Hate”, you are right. Now, what’s the meaning of “I don’t love you”.

If you answered “I hate you”, you are probably wrong. The most accurate meaning of “I don’t love you” is “You are indifferent to me”. People often get confused with these type of sentences and many a times misinterpret them.

Today, let’s try to understand these gray areas in interpretation.

What’s the definition of “opposite”? Opposite means being on the other side of the mid point but having the same distance from center as your origin. For example, opposite of good is bad, better is worse and best is worst. They all have same levels of comparison degrees but in exactly mirror sides of OK or average.

I don’t know why, but as we grow up with tend to equate negations “I don’t love you”, with opposites “I hate you”. We tend to live in this world, where you are 0 or 1. You cannot be 0.5 or 0.642. You have to chose a side.

We treat so many irrelevant things, with intensity of life or death, or, right or wrong (and most of the time forget the relevant things), and these create misunderstandings, between a lot of people.

We as humans have evolved to read between the lines. To have a common sense, and deduct a lot of things, but we see in daily life, how effectively we miscommunicate. This is why, requirement engineers spend hundreds of hours, finalizing client requirements and developers figuring out where their system failed.

Here, I present 3 easy, but foundational points for effective communication:

  1. As a speaker, have your thoughts aligned and if you have the luxury of time, write down and see if they convey what you wanna say, also ask someone to read it, or listen you practice, and find out if the article conveys what’s in your head. While conversing, take time for collecting your thoughts and listen to yourself while talking. It’s difficult, but most of the time responses are short.
  2. As a listener, listen to the speakers points, and try to understand and link their saying to what you already know. Ask questions to clarify if you think the sentence was ambiguous. Don’t rush to oppose the speaker if he’s wrong, instead look where he’s going.
  3. For both, at the end of the talk or conversation, reiterate the main points by your understanding and ask if this is what, was said or heard.

Earlier, we used to command machines in a strict 1s and 0s. But as time went on, we added decimals, probabilities, complex plane and what not. Today, we are teaching machines to read between lines, to deduct relationships between different entities, and are progressing towards a future where machines could induce new scientific laws. It’s about time we made efforts for communicating effectively, with our species, at least.