The Mandelbear's Musings

08:00 am - (re)Defining my terms: open, transparent, receptive

My recent post defining "openness" pulled in a surprising number of comments -- thank you. Thanks in particular to filkferengi's suggestion of "transparency" for the sending side of openness. I realized a few days later that "receptiveness" is a better word than "open-mindedness" for the receiving side.

So, just to get down to the roots and make the definitions explicit...

One is transparent when one is sharing information about oneself.

One is receptive when one is taking in and taking into account information about somebody else.

 

So where does this leave "openness"? Is it merely transparecy plus receptiveness? I think not -- I think there's a whole other aspect of it that I hadn't considered last time. (See how language affects thought? Now that I have good words for the two concepts I was trying to get at downwhen, I can pull them out and consider the remainder.) I think it's captured best in phrases of the form "open to new {ideas, possibilities, relationships}". It's less about the information than about one's relationship to that information. As we will see, this will allow us to capture the meaning of such things as an "open relationship".

So...

One is open to new information, relationships, possibilities, etc. when one is not merely receptive in those areas but ready to be receptive in them. Not necessarily actively seeking out opportunities to be receptive, but willing to persue them if they should come along.

Similarly, one is open about an area when one is ready to be transparent about that area when the occasion calls for it. (Note that I originally had "willing" instead of "ready" in these two definitions, but I think that "ready" better expresses the idea of active preparedness that I'm looking for.

It's worth noting that any kind of relationship requires a significant amount of both receptivity and transparency -- one has to be ready for both in order to be "open" in the more general sense.

A relationship is open when both parties in that relationship -- by extension all parties where applicable -- are open to new relationships. Similarly, a group is open when it is open to new members. Note that there may be -- and usually are -- quite restrictive conditions on this kind of openness.

 

As usual, comments are welcome. What are your definitions? Do mine seem to work, or am I still missing something or getting something wrong? Inquiring minds...

08:44 am - Experience

A recent conversation made me wonder just how many "relationships" (by some definition) I've had over the course of my life, and how many ended in "breakups" as opposed to just quietly drifting apart (or, in one case, staying together for over three decades).

So let's define a "relationship" as something lasting more than a month, with some non-trivial level of romantic involvement ("love" by some definition), mutual physical attraction and physical contact. Define "breakup" as an abrupt, major decrease in the closeness of the relationship.

The answers turn out to be seven and one.

The corresponding numbers for Colleen, who is 5 years younger than me, are four and zero.

11:05 pm - Defining my terms: Openness

It occurs to me that, in a series of posts about mental states and relationships, I probably ought to define my terms. It's only fair, especially in an area where peoples' personal definitions are both vitally important to them and in some cases appear to have very little overlap.

Since this is an exercise in information sharing, it seems only right to start off with my definition for openness.

Openness:

Openness is, fundamentally, willingness to share information. In both directions. One might call the receiving direction "open-mindedness", though that's probably only part of it; I can't think of a good word for the sending direction. Anyone?

So let's take the sending direction first. Openness, in that direction, is a willingness to share information about yourself with others. There are degrees, of course, both in who one shares with and how -- and exactly what -- much one is willing to share. Some people share their most intimate feelings only with their closes friends; others (like me) "publish and be damned" almost everything on the open web.

In the other direction, openness is most of all a willingness to listen. It implies both interest in what the other person is saying, and (where applicable) a willingness to consider new information and possibly change one's own mind.

There's a lot of similarity between openness in relationships and in software; a good open-source software project not only shares its code freely, but accepts bug reports and patches for that code. It's not exact; there is, unfortunately, no revision-control system for relationships.

Most of the time I'm pretty far out on the openness side of the scale, by my own measure. There's very little about my own emotional life that I wouldn't publish here in my LJ, or put into a song. There have been a couple of times when I've suddenly thought "did I just say that to the entire damned Internet?" and friends-locked a post, but it feels wrong when I do it. As if there was something I needed to hide.

Sometimes I do need to hide things, though. I won't share anything I understand to have been told to me in confidence, and I won't share anything I understand will hurt someone else or reveal information they don't regard as private. The key word here is understand -- I'm all too likely to default to my own standards of openness; feel free to whap me with a cluestick if I blunder and cross one of your boundaries.

I've run across other peoples' boundaries enough lately that I'm setting up a private journal that's just for myself, finally. I haven't had a private journal in nearly four decades, but I have to write about things if I expect to understand them, and I need to be open with myself even if I can't necessarily share those particular thoughts with anyone else. It still feels wrong.

So, just as a reminder: this is my definition. You can tell me how it differs from your definition -- I really hope you do, in fact, since one of the motivations for this is to find out how my use of language differs from everyone else's -- and I'll be glad if you point out obvious inconsistencies or mistakes, or places where I could be more precise. You don't get to tell me that my definition is wrong. (edit 5/4) You can tell me why it doesn't really appear to be the definition I'm actually using. And you can tell me why you think I should be using a different one.

Similarly, you can tell me where you are on the scale, but you don't get to tell me I'm in the wrong place.