A Complaint Should Know What It Wants

A culture of toughness suggests not complaining, so as not to look weak. That ban usually produces not fortitude but people who stay silent until they blow up.

A complaint can serve different functions:

• reporting a violation;
• asking for help;
• looking for sympathy;
• warning others;
• putting a problem into words;
• releasing tension;
• getting something changed.

The problem is not the complaint itself but endless repetition with no idea of the purpose.

Before the conversation it helps to work out:

Do I want to be heard?

Do I need advice?

Am I asking for a specific action?

Am I going to change the situation?

Or do I just want to be unhappy for a while?

The last one is allowed too. Not every feeling has to become an improvement project on the spot.

But it is better to tell the other person the format. Someone who wanted sympathy is rarely delighted by a seven-point plan. Someone who needs help can get tired of philosophical accompaniment.

When describing a problem, it helps to go beyond the damage. Worth adding:

• what you have already tried;
• what happened;
• where you need someone else’s involvement;
• what result would be enough.

Better still, ask whether the other person has run into anything similar. That turns the conversation from a suffering contest into an exchange of experience.

A complaint becomes destructive not because it shows weakness. It becomes destructive when it spends years standing in for a solution, a request, a boundary or a departure.

The most common domestic accident looks like this. One comes home and says everything at work is terrible. The other, wanting to help, suggests quitting, changing industry and rewriting the CV. The first is hurt, the second is baffled. Nobody did anything wrong: one was asking for twenty minutes of sympathy, the other heard a request to solve a problem. The format was never announced, and the evening went on establishing which of them was the bad one.

A functional sentence at the start helps: “I don’t need advice, I need to complain for ten minutes.” It sounds awkward and saves the evening. A separate benefit is that sometimes, while saying it, the person discovers they do want the advice after all.