What ‘Mean’ Means

It is hard to write about the word mean. It is hard to even talk about what 'mean' means because the sentence "what mean means" already sounds like it is broken. The word is everywhere. It is in every household and every classroom and every marriage and every arithmetic textbook and it is doing different work in each of those places or at least it appears to be doing different work. There is a natural lexical ambiguity to it that makes the whole subject slip around the moment you try to hold it still. You say "that's mean" and you could be talking about cruelty or you could be talking about an average or you could be talking about an intention and the strange thing is that all three of those are actually the same thing if you look at them long enough.

I am going to try to look at them long enough.

The Arithmetic

The arithmetic mean is the operation that removes particularity. You feed it individual values each one distinct each one itself and it hands you back a single number that is none of them. It is the function that says I acknowledge your existence and I have included you in the count and I have moved on. It does not hold anyone. It does not weight anyone. It processes and flattens and returns the middle.

Every other meaning of the word orbits this one.

When someone says you are being mean they are not usually saying you have fallen below some minimum standard of acceptable human conduct. They are saying something more specific and more painful. They are saying you are treating me like everyone else. You are not making an exception because it is me. You are applying the general case to a person who believed she was the special case.

That is what mean means. It is the experience of being averaged.

My eldest daughter has recently discovered the sentence "Daddy you're being mean" and she uses it with the confidence of someone who has found a universal key and is now trying it on every door in the house. And she is right to use it. Not because I am being cruel. But because she is performing a very sophisticated measurement that she does not have the vocabulary to describe. She is measuring the delta between how she expected to be treated and how she is being treated and she is reporting that delta and she is calling it mean.

The word is correct. The arithmetic middle is exactly the thing that does not hold anyone. And what she is telling me is that she expected to be held and for a moment she was not.

Asymmetry and Expectation

The real issue is asymmetry. It is the expectation that you are supposed to treat someone as greater than the mean at all times and at all costs. That you owe them a permanent exception. That the baseline for how you treat a stranger is not the baseline for how you treat them and that any moment where those two things converge is a betrayal.

This is not entirely wrong. Closeness does produce asymmetry. When you love someone you do treat them differently. You are more patient. More generous with your interpretation of what they just said. More willing to let something go. This is real and it matters and its absence is felt immediately.

But the expectation that this asymmetry must be maintained at every moment without exception is not realistic and it is not reasonable. People get tired. People are distracted. People are carrying things that have nothing to do with the person in front of them. And sometimes the general case is the correct case. Sometimes the rule applies to everyone including the person you love and applying it is not cruelty it is just honesty.

The problem is that honesty without asymmetry is indistinguishable from indifference. And indifference from someone who is supposed to be partial to you is worse than hostility from someone who is not. Hostility at least acknowledges you as a specific target. The mean just includes you in the count.

Humiliation

There is another word that works the same way mean does. Humiliation. We use it to describe a specific kind of cruelty. Someone humiliated me. The image is of being degraded or embarrassed or made small in front of others.

But that is not what the word actually says. The word says you made me feel human. Not a queen. Not a princess. Not someone elevated or protected or exceptional. Just human. Just another person in the general population of people. The humiliation is not in being pushed down. It is in not being lifted up. It is the discovery that you are standing on the same ground as everyone else when you believed you were standing somewhere higher.

Between a husband and wife this is where most of the pain lives. Not in cruelty. Not in insults or hostility or any of the things people imagine when they think of a bad argument. The pain lives in the moments where one person treats the other as ordinary. Where the asymmetry disappears and for a second or an hour or an evening you are just two people in a room and neither of you is bending for the other and that flatness after years of curvature feels like a wound even when nothing cruel has been said or done.

My wife and I have been together for twelve years. She has told me I am being mean more times than I can count and for a long time I heard it as an accusation of cruelty and I defended against that. Which is exactly the wrong thing to do because that is not what she was saying. She was saying you have made me feel human. You have treated me as a general case. You have responded to what I said rather than to who I am. And the difference between what she said and who she is is twelve years of accumulated context and private grammar and all the mutual interpretation that two people build when they have been together long enough to finish each other's sentences badly.

I got this wrong for years. I kept solving the wrong equation.

What Is Conditional

Here is the thing about marriage that nobody says clearly enough. The love is conditional. That is not a flaw in the institution. That is the institution. You have ostensibly chosen each other and the relationship only continues insofar as you continue to choose each other. Every day. That is what makes it special. That is what separates it from every other bond you will ever have. It is not held in place by blood or biology or obligation that predates your ability to consent to it. It is held in place by repeated voluntary continuation. The fact that it could end is exactly the fact that gives it meaning.

And this is why being averaged by your spouse hurts so much. Because the asymmetry is the evidence of the choice. When your spouse treats you as exceptional it is proof that they are still choosing you. When they treat you as ordinary it raises the question of whether they still are. The conditional nature of the love makes every moment of flatness feel like a renegotiation. It is not "you are being cruel." It is "are you still choosing me." And that is a much more frightening question.

What Is Unconditional

This morning my eldest daughter scratched at her younger sister's arms over a set of stickers and I separated them and took the stickers away and told her she could have them back in the evening. This resulted in a tantrum that lasted about an hour. Screaming at the top of her lungs. "It's our worst day ever." The full catastrophe.

I escalated the consequence as the tantrum continued because that is how consequences work. First it was no stickers until the evening. Then it was no stickers today. Then it was those stickers are gone. Not because I wanted to take them. Because she kept going and the lesson needed to hold. And all of this despite drawers full of stickers and a trip to Florida coming up where she will want for nothing. She would have forgotten about those stickers in five minutes if she had just moved on. Instead she spent an hour punishing herself and did not know she was doing it.

At some point during the tantrum she said "it feels like my heart's breaking."

I do not know if that was about the stickers or about whether she thought I was angry at her or whether she thought I did not love her anymore. But I know what I told her afterwards. I told her that my love for her and her sister is unconditional. That it does not matter if she is good or bad or smart or dumb or fast or slow or clumsy or focused. I will always love her. She could beat up her sister. She could scream for three hours. She could poop on my head. The love does not change. It does not depend on who she is or what she does or whether she makes the right choices. It is fixed. It is structural. It is not going anywhere.

This is the opposite of marriage. This is the thing that is not conditional. Blood bonds do not require repeated voluntary continuation. They do not need to be chosen. They are. My daughters did not choose me and I did not choose them in the way that a spouse chooses a spouse. We arrived at each other by a different mechanism and that mechanism does not have an opt out clause. The love is a fact before it is a feeling. It is architecture not agreement.

And the reason I am so insistent about saying this to them, over and over, in good moments and bad ones, is because I need the correction to be separable from the love. I need my daughter to understand that Daddy taking the stickers away and Daddy loving her are two completely independent operations running on two completely different systems. The first is conditional. It depends on what she did. The second is not. It depends on nothing. And those two things have to be legible to her as distinct or the whole structure becomes unstable.

The Separation

I think the thing I am trying to teach my daughters and the thing I am still trying to learn in my marriage are actually the same lesson seen from opposite ends.

With my wife the lesson is that conditional love is not lesser love. It is chosen love. And sometimes in chosen love the asymmetry will disappear and the mean will reassert itself and that is not evidence of failure it is evidence of being human. The humiliation of being treated as ordinary by someone who usually treats you as exceptional is real and it is painful but it is not the same as cruelty and confusing the two makes everything worse.

With my daughters the lesson is that unconditional love does not mean unconditional approval. That the correction is not the love and the love is not the correction and they run on different tracks and always will. I can be firm and present and unmoving about the consequence and also be the person who stops at the shop on the way to school to get a sweet snack and sits on a bench and says I love you no matter what. Those are not contradictions. They are the two things operating simultaneously. They are the job.

What I Have Not Learned

I have not learned to never be mean. That would require me to maintain the asymmetry at all times which is impossible and dishonest and would make me a weak husband, a weak parent and weak person. Sometimes the general case is the correct case. Sometimes my daughter cannot have stickers after she has scratched her sister. Sometimes my wife has to hear something she does not want to hear. The answer is still no about the ice cream.

But I have learned what the word actually means. It means I have been averaged. It means someone who expected to occupy a particular position in my model of the world has been processed as generic input. And knowing that is the difference between defending yourself against an accusation of cruelty and simply saying yes. I see you. You are not a general case. The rule still applies but I know it is landing on a specific person and not just on a person.

After this mornings tantrum had burned itself out I got us all a special sweet something to help use recharge after so much energy was spent on crying and being stern. We could have a calm moment to talk and repair and explain what I believe most.

It is not the mistake that defines you. It is what you do after the mistake. Everybody will miss the mark. What matters is whether you own it and move on and try to do better. I gave her the example of the night before when I got too frustrated with her over a book and lost my patience with a six year old who was exhausted and confused and I told her I was wrong. That I owned it. That it did not make me a good or bad person in total. Just a person who was not good in that moment and who is going to try to be better in the next one.

That is all I have. That is all anyone has. The willingness to be averaged and then to try again to be specific. To be mean and then to try again to be particular. To be general and then to remember that the person in front of you is not general at all. She is my daughter. She is six. She thinks her heart is breaking over stickers and she is not wrong because the stickers were never the point.

The point was whether she was still special. And she is. She always will be. That part is unconditional and it is the only part that is.