Let's be honest :)

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the concept of honest communication. I tested someone this week to see how well they would do with honest communication, and I realized something in this experiment, the thoughts that people verbalize are sometimes not in proportion to their actual emotions. You’d think that in an age where freedom of speech is highly encouraged and is seen indicator of our modernization, people would be more inclined to speak truthfully. But it seems to me that this entitlement has caused society to become highly sensitive, and in our sensitivity we actually tend to censor a lot of our thoughts, or maybe we’re just putting them in quotations. It annoys me when I find myself having to decipher conversations on a regular basis as if we were communicating in double entrendes – have I missed something here? Is this an allegory? Then I have to do things like learning how to read body language, or analyzing the eyes – It’s so taxing! But maybe we are not quite comfortable with being frank – this world would be much too swift and the thrill of chasing pavements would be gone. Maybe.
My experiment also led me to the conclusion that there is a lot of cowardice involved in in communication. I knew that the person I was talking to was only giving me little excerpts of what they actually thought; I could tell that they were waiting for a specific response from me. And depending on how I would respond, they would shape their thoughts to fit mine. I’m sure this person thought that this was a compromise; however, this form of communication only led us to both partake in a dishonest conversation. It was like, fine you won’t tell me, then I won’t tell you neither. We were only willing to risk as much as we could get, and for that reason, we were just speaking at each other and not with each other.