I think one of the most difficult things I have had to do in my adult life was to learn to communicate. I know a lot of people think they know how to communicate. I thought I did. Boy, was I wrong.

I grew up in a family where we didn't talk about unpleasant things. I think it was part of my parent's era, since they were all born in the 1920's, when unpleasant things were swept under the carpet, and you never ever talked about them to people outside the family. Talking about them to the family members wasn't done, either.

I'm sure there was communication going on somewhere, but it wasn't in front of the children. I don't remember seeing my parents fight. Sure, there were little spats, where one disagreed with the other, or someone pissed someone else off, and they sniped at each other for ten minutes or so, but that was it. Not the screaming, violent fights I saw at some of my friend's houses. I'm sure my parents fought. But not in front of the children.

For instance, my grandfather was an alcoholic. We all knew it. We never talked about it. I remember being around eight one time when my grandmother told me that my grandfather wasn't feeling well. Being eight, and still having to learn about tact, I replied that he was too drunk to stand up. I got smacked, my parents were told, and I was grounded. That night, I was told we didn't talk about things like that. End of subject.

With all that, it's no wonder I grew up not knowing how to communicate. Of course I could get my feelings across quite plainly when I was mad, but who can't do that? I needed to learn to get my feelings across to someone when I wasn't mad. That took years.

Sometime during my soul-searching phase, when I was trying to figure out why I was so unhappy with my life, I learned to be brutally honest with myself. I started to understand why I did some of the things I did, and even though I didn't want to admit some of them, I accepted they were things I was doing. I learned to be honest with myself. So I began my journey of learning to communicate.

The next step consisted of learning to be honest with the people I care for, without being nasty about it. I'm quite good at being brutally honest in a very nasty way. That wasn't what is needed for real communication, however, so I kept working at it. And I learned how to tell my friends when they had done something that had upset me, without burying it inside until I got pushed too far and exploded. I learned to talk to people about problems in a way that didn't make them instantly feel defensive, unlike a lot of confrontational situations.

The word confrontation has such ugly connotations. When people think of confrontations, they picture anger and raised voices as a big part of it. It doesn't have to be that way. A confrontation can be something like saying, "You did this, and it upset me, and I want to know why you did it," all in a normal tone of voice. So I learned to confront people without doing it in anger.

When I started my foray into polyamory, I thought I'd learned enough about how to communciate to make it work. To be able to talk to my long-term SO, and work out any problems we had. I was wrong. In February, he came to me, and told me he still loved me, but he wasn't in love with me anymore, and he wanted to leave before we started hating each other.

I hadn't realized we had any problems. I thought things were good between us. I was upset. I tried to take all the blame for everything, then realized that communcation is a two-way street. He was as much to blame as I was.

I'd been trying to tell him who was in my life, what they meant to me, and keep him generally informed. Apparently, I didn't tell him what he meant to me. I found out after the fact that he thought I'd been indifferent to our relationship over the past two years. I thought we were happy, and if he had any problems, he'd tell me. This was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And I never made that plain to him, in a way that he really understood. I told him I loved him more than anything, but I guess that wasn't what he needed to hear. I'm still not sure what I should have said.

It still bothers me that we didn't communicate about it before it was too late. I feel responsible because I don't think I stressed how important communication was in an open relationship. Because although I was trying to communicate, I wasn't communicating the right things. But part of the blame goes to him as well. He could have told me how he felt a long time before he did. It might not have changed how things worked out, but at least I would have known that there was a problem.

I did learn something from all this. That I need to work more on my communication skills. That I need to stress how important communication is in any relationship I have. That if someone isn't communicating with me, I need to make sure they don't have any problems they're burying inside, because they think it will upset me to bring them out in the open. I've always been one of those people that doesn't ask lots of prying questions. I've always figured that if someone wants me to know something, they will tell me when they're ready.

It's very hard to tell someone something you think may hurt them. I've always believed that you shouldn't ask the question if you don't want to hear the truth. And I learned that the truth is rarely worse than what my imagination comes up with when something has happened and I don't know the real reason why. You can't work out any problem if you don't know it's there, or what it is. This is especially true for polyamory, but even a monogamous relationship needs communication if it's going to grow instead of stagnate and die.

So I learned from my mistakes. Only I learned too late. You know what they say about hindsight being 20/20 vision. They're right. It just really doesn't make me feel any better.