I’m writing this post because a minor relationship problem, which to me is shaped like the kind of relationship problem that never gets solved, got solved in my marriage.
When I met my now-husband, he regularly made jokes that weren’t funny to me. Infatuated with most other things about him, I was politely silent, but eventually the polite silence didn’t seem like an adequate response. I was starting to get an “oh no… I can’t stand this…” feeling after some of these jokes, out of proportion to the badness of the joke itself.
I decided I need to Have A Conversation. I told him I didn’t find his jokes funny and tried to explain (some of) my theory of humor of what made a joke work and why his didn’t land for me. He heard me out, but my model of humor failed to transfer between our minds.
With his consent, I started rating his jokes from -3 to 3. (The range just seemed right. I use -10 to 10 for most other things.) He also rated my jokes back, although less frequently. The conversational overhead was small. The typical conversation went like this:
- My husband would make a pun.
- I’d say, “Negative one point five.”
- Pause. “Okay.”
- The conversation would resume.
(The pause feels important to me. He’s taking time to register my opinion, to give his brain a second to change itself slightly.)
Or:
- Pun.
- “Two.”
- Husband, in a surprised tone: “Oh! That good?”
- Conversation resumes.
At the beginning, if the rating were positive, there would sometimes be bit of discussion before the conversation resumed. Almost never when it was bad, as we’d established that it’s hard to explain why a joke is bad. But sometimes I can explain why it’s good.
Over the years, real time feedback worked where explicating my theory of funniness had not. These days, most of his jokes rate above a 0. The part of me that was going “oof” and grimacing early on in the relationship has melted away.