Chapter 13: Loving Someone You Cannot Read
Elena had decided, around seven o’clock, that Marcus was upset with her. They had eaten dinner together, and he had been quiet. He had answered her questions in short sentences. He had stared at the television without re
Elena had decided, around seven o’clock, that Marcus was upset with her.
They had eaten dinner together, and he had been quiet. He had answered her questions in short sentences. He had stared at the television without really watching it. Something, she was convinced, had happened. She went through the evening in search of the cause. Had it been the comment she made about his brother at the weekend? Her tone when she asked about his meeting? The fact that she had forgotten to buy his favorite coffee?
For the next three hours, Elena moved around the apartment with great care. She laughed at the right moments. She asked gentle, open-ended questions. She made tea and left it near his elbow without comment. She felt like a person defusing a bomb. Internally, she kept up a silent commentary: He’s sighing. Why is he sighing? Is it me?
At ten o’clock, Marcus turned to her with a worn, bewildered look. “Are you okay?” he said. “You’ve been weird all night.”
Elena stared. “I’ve been weird? You’ve barely spoken to me.”
“I have a deadline tomorrow and a splitting headache,” said Marcus. “I’ve been trying not to be grumpy.”
There was a long pause, in which both of them recognized the shape of the previous three hours. She had spent them decoding a mood that was about a headache. He had spent them wondering what was wrong with her.
Mind reading is guessing with confidence
We spend a great deal of time inferring what is going on in other people’s heads. Usually it works well enough for ordinary life. But it works much less well than we feel it does.
This chapter has a different focus from Chapter 11. There we were waiting in silence for a message that had not come. Here the other person is in the room, and what we are trying to read is a face, a tone of voice, a posture. The temptation is the same, to fill the gap with a confident story, but the remedy changes, because here a question can be asked right now.
The psychologist Nicholas Epley, who has spent years studying how people think about other minds, has argued that we tend to be overconfident in our ability to read others. We feel as though we have direct access to what someone is feeling, but our accuracy is often only modestly better than guessing, and the feeling of certainty runs ahead of the facts.
A telling example comes from a set of studies led by Justin Kruger, with Epley and colleagues, on email. People were asked to send messages in which they intended a certain tone, serious or sarcastic, and to predict whether the recipients would understand. The senders predicted that they would be understood far more often than they actually were. They could hear the tone in their own heads, so they assumed it was audible on the page. The same thing happens in reverse. We “hear” tone in other people’s messages and are sure we heard it correctly.
If this is true of strangers and of text, it is quietly true of the people we love, too. Closeness gives us more data. It does not give us telepathy.
Projection, and the version of them in our heads
When we have to guess, we guess with the materials we have, and the materials we have are mostly ourselves. If I am worried that I said something wrong, then I read your silence as displeasure. If I am prone to guilt, I hear criticism where none was meant. The inference says as much about the inferrer as about the person inferred.
There is also a more elaborate form of this: the imagined conversation. Elena, through the evening, was not responding to Marcus. She was responding to a version of Marcus in her head, the one who was cross about the comment on his brother. She was apologizing to him, justifying herself to him, and bracing for the argument she had constructed. By the time she looked at the real man, she had been in a relationship with a fiction for three hours.
Behavior versus intention
A helpful discipline is to keep two kinds of information apart. Behavior is what someone said and did: He answered in short sentences. He sighed. He watched the television. Intention and feeling is what we infer about why: He’s angry with me.
Behavior is observable. Intention is guessed. And the same behavior can come from many different inner states: a headache, a deadline, a bad day, a private worry, a mood that has nothing to do with you. When we skip straight from behavior to intention, we usually choose the one that fits our fears.
There is a relief in remembering that you are not responsible for decoding anyone. You do not need to know what someone is thinking in order to love them well. You need to be honest about what you notice, and willing to ask.
The firmer ground of honest conversation
The alternative to endless interpretation is a plain question, asked with warmth. It sounds almost insultingly simple, but it is rarely done, because asking feels exposing. What if the answer is worse than what I’m imagining? And so we keep guessing.
In practice, the answer is usually much more ordinary than the guess. And even when it is difficult, a hard truth that you know is steadier ground than a hard story you imagined.
Try this: Replace one assumption with a question
Think of a recent moment when you filled in someone’s motives. Walk through these steps.
- Name the observation. What did you actually see or hear? Marcus was quiet and short with me tonight.
- Name the story. What did you assume? He’s upset with me about the comment on his brother.
- Turn it into a question. Aim for curious, not accusing. I noticed you were quiet tonight. I’m wondering if something’s on your mind, or if you’re just tired. Either is fine, I’d just like to know if I can help.
- Choose the moment. Not in the middle of a task or an argument, and not so late that it becomes a scene.
- Listen to the answer. If the answer is “I’m just tired,” let it be an answer. You can hold it provisionally, and let patterns over time confirm or contradict it. But don’t immediately reinterpret it as evasion.
A short formula that many people find easy to remember is: “I noticed ___. I’m making up a story that ___. Is that close, or is something else going on?” It admits the guess without insisting on it, and it gives the other person the dignity of correcting you.
Elena tried this the next week. When Marcus was quiet at the dinner table, she waited a few minutes and said, “I noticed you’ve gone quiet. My brain is telling me I did something. Is that close, or is it just a long day?” He smiled, a little wearily. “Long day,” he said. “Thank you for asking.” She felt something unclench in her shoulders that she hadn’t noticed was tight.
What this asks of you. The question only works if you can accept the answer. If “just tired” leaves you unsatisfied, notice that, rather than interrogating further. Over time you build a record of how this person actually behaves, which is better evidence than any single guess. If the answers are repeatedly evasive or dismissive, that is a conversation about the relationship, not about one evening.
A THOUGHT TO CARRY
You cannot read someone’s mind. But you can ask, and you can listen.