An open letter about gossip

Chuck Durrett, along with his wife Katie McCamant, popularized the Danish concept of cohousing in this country with the publication of their 1988 book. Here Chuck offers an open letter about his personal experiences in avoiding a corrosive aspect of living in community.

In the summer of 1995, four years after moving into Doyle Street cohousing, Katie and I did some work for the Hutterite community in upstate New York, a pacifist community like the Amish that was started in Switzerland in 1500 and moved to the U.S. just after WWII. In their Bruderhof community of 450 people, small signs were posted that read,

Please no gossip, not even to your spouse.
Please do not put your neighbor in a negative light.

When we returned to Emeryville, CA, I put a proposal on the next Doyle Street Cohousing agenda that we adopt the same policy. In a rare event, everyone came to that meeting, curious about the topic. I said to one neighbor, “Wow, you’re coming to a meeting?” as we walked in the door at the common house. She answered, “Oh, I can’t wait to see how this discussion goes.”

What came out of the meeting weren’t new signs, but we did have a deep and meaningful discussion about gossip. A lot of consciousness was raised. In that meeting every individual agreed to look every other community member in the eye one at a time and say (for example):

• “Stephanie, if you have a problem with me, of any kind at any time, please come and speak to me directly. And if you don’t feel comfortable talking to me like that, please propose a third person to come and help facilitate a discussion or to just listen,” or
• “Bob, if you have a problem with anything that I have said or done, please come talk to me as soon as you can,” or
• “Chris, I care about you very much as a person and I respect you very much and I appreciate everything that you have done for the community, for my family, and for me, and if I ever piss you off, as I am wont to do, please, please come talk to me,” etc.

We formally gave each other permission to address us personally with whatever concerns they had.

In the next eight years, I participated in two such discussions, about par for each of us (except Katie – she rarely ruffles feathers). One was when someone said “Chuck, we have to talk.” It turns out he was right – I was too bossy at the workdays. Another time my neighbor Margarette really pissed me off so I asked if we could speak. She asked another neighbor to join us, and it transformed our communication and relationship. My relationship with those two people changed completely. Later, I was at Margarette’s deathbed, which might not have happened otherwise.

Our new approach to gossip was a watershed in our community. I believe that lots of individual relationships with one another were altered dramatically by those encounters. We formally gave each other permission to talk to each other directly if there were things that could go more smoothly between us.

It meant that concerns were aired face-to-face in the most loving means possible, as opposed to behind people’s backs where comments are less kind and more exaggerated. When people are talking about others, a negative air overcomes the community, but when people are talking to each other, a positive air pervades. I noticed this when I was a kid living in small towns.

It also meant that when you walked up and said, “Oh, I can’t believe what Henry did. I think he should do [such and such], ” the other person would say, “You should go say that to Henry.” And you’d remember, “Oh yeah, Henry gave me permission to air my concerns directly to him.” The fact is, we just don’t do it otherwise, unless we grew up in a small town where people have a history (sometimes over many generations) and where it is part of the culture.

People gossip for lots of reasons, most of them not bad ones. I believe we want to communicate without being confrontational. Among other things, it can mean saying something to a third party dramatically enough because you hope to get the message to the offending person without it being watered down and without having to risk saying it directly to that person. (The mean-spirited reason people gossip is to look better by making someone else look worse.)

I gossip and I don’t want to. I found that once we made the agreement in Emeryville, gossip (including my own) decreased by about 85%.

This solution is very much like living in a small town where people are direct – at least that’s true of the towns I’ve lived in. Some might say that candor can be confrontational and it does take a little getting used to, but it’s not at all as problematic as people talking about you behind your back. Direct, polite (never mean) and heartfelt communication works best.

I’ll be making a similar proposal – formally giving each other permission to talk to you if they have an issue with something you have said or done – at the next meeting of our new 34-unit cohousing community in Nevada City.

In community,
Chuck

Later postscript: The Nevada City meeting was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had living there. It was so great to look each person in the eye and be able to tell each one what they meant to me and that I would never, ever want to upset them. And to tell them that if I do, to know it would mean the most to me if they could come talk to me directly about it.