I was talking to someone recently (I think it was at work), and they said they can’t imagine me yelling at anyone. And, for the past 12 years, that’s true — I haven’t yelled at anyone.

You can credit my second wife for that. She told me up front that yelling triggered her, so I spent a full year teaching myself not to yell when I was angry, upset, or frustrated. I used to do all of those things when I was married to my first wife, because I thought I had no choice. When I grew up, my parents did yell quite a bit, so I figured that was what you were supposed to do as an adult when you were angry at someone or about something.

Which is not to say that I haven’t screamed a few times since then, but I usually do it in the privacy of my car, where no one can hear it. The most memorable time was at the old dungeon in Atlanta; I was there with my girlfriend, and she was playing with someone new. She had told me what they’d negotiated prior to the scene, and anyway I was fine with her playing with other people. However, when I peeked in on the scene to make sure she was okay I saw that at least three of those boundaries had been broken. It didn’t look like she was in any nonconsensual distress, so I excused myself without being seen and went out to the car to scream because I didn’t know what to do with myself. (We did end up talking about it afterward and I expressed myself to her in a calm, rational fashion.) Sometimes you just have to, I guess.

I really wanted to yell at that guy when the two of them got into a dynamic (while this particular girlfriend and I were still dating), not because they were in a dynamic, but because he was unreasonable. She had done something — I don’t remember what it was — and he’d assigned her 1000 lines (long ones), which she couldn’t do due to previous injuries to her hand/wrist area. He also said he wouldn’t talk to her until the punishment was done. And this wasn’t a young, new dom; this guy had been around for a while. He should’ve known better. (If you’re interested, she didn’t end up doing the lines, and she did talk to him, and shortly thereafter the dynamic ended.)

Now, I have yelled to people — like, for example, when I lived in a two-story house and my daughter was upstairs; I yelled up the stairs to her that dinner was ready, or that I needed her to come down for some other reason. But I wasn’t yelling at her; I was just making myself heard. Sometimes you have to yell because people are too far away to hear your normal speaking voice. A good example: I was at an Indigo Girls concert with Partner 2 and some guy in the audience kept yelling “come back to Macon!” It was annoying, but he wasn’t yelling at the band; he was yelling to them, so they could hear him. Which I’m sure they did. They ignored him, by the way.

There are definitely situationally-appropriate times to yell, but for the most part, I don’t see the point. I can usually communicate without raising my voice. I was motivated to change, so I changed. Love was the motivator. My parents love each other (they’ve been married for more than 50 years) but they do still yell sometimes. I feel like maybe some couples therapy about 35-40 years ago would’ve helped. Just saying.

I don’t have to yell. And I think not yelling has made my life better overall.

Try it.