4 ms·

I consider "being reasonable" equivalent to "being able to be communicated with"... i.e. the essence of unreasonableness is broken communication; i.e. unwilling

• Jtsummers 5y ago
  Also unwillingness to speak. How many of us have had a strained relationship (personal, professional) that's made worse because we don't know why it's strained? "You know what you did!" is often not true. I had a colleague who became absurdly cold to me, ignoring me for weeks. I tried to speak with him and find out what had happened but he gave me the silent treatment (we didn't work directly together, adjacent projects, so the lack of communication wasn't an issue for the work itself). Finally, one day he decided to pull me aside and air his feelings. It turned out it was a misunderstanding, but it had turned into nearly two months of awkwardness in the office (I worked with the people who sat near him and was often in his space as a result). And even if it hadn't been a simple misunderstanding, I still never knew what the problem was until he finally spoke. If it had been the result of deliberate malice or carelessness on my part, then we could have tried to resolve it much earlier (or found an inability to resolve it if it had been a fundamental conflict of views or something), but the silence made it impossible to even address.