www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-ridiculous-thing-you-and-your-spouse-fight-about/answer/Joreth-InnkeeperQ. What is the most ridiculous thing you and your spouse fight about?
A. Franklin and I once got into an argument at a kink convention. We were waiting in line for registration and someone walked past us with some kind of bright, unnatural hair color. I don’t remember what color it was, but it caught our attention. Franklin called the color by one name, I called it by another name. And I don’t mean he called it “carnation pink” while I called it “rose pink”, I mean we called it by actual different color names. We were both adamant that it was the name we called it. We were both shocked that the other apparently saw a totally different color.
For some reason, this debate felt personal and I had to insist we drop the subject. It got all wrapped up in my feelings of being dismissed by a partner, of having my judgement questioned, of being ‘splained at (because I’m a photographer and a lighting technician - I literally get paid to create color with light), of a whole bunch of other things.
I couldn’t understand why he was disagreeing with me, or why he saw the color so differently. Unlike the stereotype, Franklin is also a photographer and used to work in printwork, like, magazine layouts and stuff. He actually has a really good, nuanced eye for color. But we saw this color so very differently.
Later, we had a totally different conversation that clarified things for me. It’s not that we saw different colors, it’s that we both saw the exact same color and we just arrived at it from different perspectives.
You see, I work with light. Color in lighting is an additive process. You add colors together to get different colors. Franklin works with ink, which is a subtractive process (
https://www.xrite.com/blog/additive-subtractive-color-models). You take colors out to get other colors. When you add all the colors of light together, you get white. When you add all the colors of paint and ink together, you get a dark, murky brownish, greyish black.
I see the world in terms of how light waves interact with each other. Franklin sees the world in terms of pigment. I see the world in RBG and he sees it in CMYK
Once we got to the root of the problem, the argument no longer upset me. It was simply a matter of coming to the same conclusion from two different perspectives - neither of us was wrong, but in different contexts, we each had different perspectives.
It’s my experience that “serious” arguments over “silly” things are really symptoms of deeper things like worldviews or perspectives. We could have just let this argument go and dismissed it as being “silly” because the name of that person’s hair color was completely irrelevant to anything important in our lives (or we could have asked him the manufacturer’s label for that color and solved the debate). And, honestly, we did both let it go.
But when an opportunity came up to look deeper into the conflict, I took it, and discovered something more important at stake - it wasn’t really about the name of the color, it was about respecting each other’s different experiences and knowledge bases and perspectives. We had the opportunity to learn more about each other as individuals, and through that learning came more understanding, which came greater respect.
So, while certainly plenty of “silly” arguments exist that have no real deeper meaning, I’ve learned that if an argument about “silly” things feels serious, it’s worth looking into why. This was a “silly” argument. But had we just let it go at that, without taking the opportunity that the subsequent discussion afforded us by making a connection to that “silly” argument, we wouldn’t have reached this better understanding of each other, and we quite possibly might have had an actual, real serious argument later where we were unable to find common ground because we hadn’t had this experience of seeing each other’s perspectives.
Not all perspectives are “valid” in that they’re not all equally correct. Sometimes someone really is just wrong about something. But, in this case, approaching a color from an additive perspective vs. approaching it from a subtractive perspective are both valid, in that they’re both legitimate approaches to arrive at a color. We got to see that about each other, and we can take that respect for our different backgrounds and experiences into our future conflicts, which have helped us to find common ground at times when it feels like we are seeing two totally different colors.
And now we play-disagree ironically about which is better - RGB or CMYK.
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