Nonassertiveness vs Assertiveness

For the past 12 years my husband and I have a house on the Wisconsin River that is 15 miles out of town and in the middle of nowhere.  A few years ago we had gotten some new neighbors that are from a suburb of Chicago.  Since this is their cabin they only come up on weekends and maybe a couple full weeks a year.  Our relationship with them hit it off right away.  My husband would help them on their remolding project, we would get our kids together to play and spend time socializing with them around the campfire.  Things were going great until we started feeling like they were taking advantage of us.

In the beginning they would borrow all sorts of stuff from us, from my husbands tools, to my ironing board and allowing their children to take toys from our house to theirs.  Their dogs would free roam in our yard and we would allow them the use of our boat landing and dock.  It did not bother us at all in the beginning as we were trying to be neighborly with our new neighbors.  As time went on the more they thought they had free will offering of our things.  They started borrowing things without asking and forget to bring them back and would use our yard as their own.  Since we did not want to cause waves with them and thought it was a short term thing we just let it be and took the non-assertive route.

Looking back I realize that this was not the way to handle the situation.  If I would have been assertive and addressed the situation when it came up, I would not have felt like we were being taken advantage of.  I felt our friendship was deteriorating because I had a lot of frustration bottled up inside and I started to avoid them when they would come up to their cabin.  Since I did not want to lose their friendship over something that could have been resolved; I told my self the next time there is a situation with them that I would not avoid it and bring it to their attention.     

The next time we had a conflict with them was this past summer.  Since we live in the country my husband as 5 hound dogs that he uses for hunting.  My husband has a really nice set-up for his hounds and I have to say they are really well behaved.  They typically will only bark when it is time to be fed, when my husband is getting things ready to go out hunting or if someone pulls into our driveway.  Our neighbors have owned their cabin for 5 years now.  They have had no major complaints to us in regards to my husband hounds or the occasional short term barking, until this past summer when they decided to rent their cabin to other families. 

One early Monday morning as my husband and I were leaving for work we seen this red light flashing by our kennels.  My husband went to check it out and found that our neighbors had put a no bark device in the shrubs.  To say the least I was furious!  I felt betrayed and felt like they disrespected our friendship.  I was upset that they hid this device without talking to us first.  All the way to work I pondered on how I was going to deal with this situation.  

Since I am unable to make personal calls at work and I wanted to get in contact with them right away the next best thing was to send an email.  I sent a very vague email asking them what this no bark device was and if there was anything we needed to know about it.  I was shocked by the response I got back stating, "Don't worry about it.  It does not work, the dogs barked for 6 days straight around the clock."  This response set me over the edge because now not only did they disrespect us, they were making false accusations against us.  Knowing how upset I was and knowing that arguing over email was not going to solve the situation I did not respond until I got home.

That evening when I got home I waited until my husband got home from work so we could call them together.  We were unable to make contact by using the telephone so we decided to send an email.  In our email we expressed how we felt betrayed and disrespected and did not understand why they did not come to us first if they felt our dogs were an issue.  We explained that we did not appreciate them making false accusations against us; as it would be like us telling them that are dogs do not bark at all.  We pointed out that we do live in the country and not the suburbs so at times our dogs may bark.  

The next day they contacted my husband by phone and had a good conversation with him.  They did apologize for the comment they made about our dogs barking around the clock and admitted that was not true.  My husband worked out a plan with them for when the dogs do bark excessively.  I feel since we did not ignore the situation, nor did we get aggressive with them and handled the conflict by being assertive the outcome was positive for all involved.