Taking a fresh look at relationships

14.1 What happened—and what we think it means

Two people agree to discuss something important that evening. When evening comes, one says, “I am a little tired today. You go ahead and get some sleep; we can talk another day.” The event itself is brief: there was an agreement to talk; it was canceled at the last moment; tiredness was the reason given; the conversation did not happen. In the other person's mind, much more may already have occurred. He is avoiding it. It means nothing to him. He will not even have a serious conversation with me anymore. Perhaps: “He always does this.” Those judgments may prove correct. Later behavior may show persistent avoidance of important conversations. The difficulty is that, in the moment of hurt, we rarely feel we are interpreting anything. We feel that this is simply how things are. What passes for fact in relationships is often not what the other person did, but the meaning we have already assigned to the event.

Meaning can arrive too quickly

Relationships do not work like ordinary information. We may shrug off a stranger’s remark, but the same words from someone important arrive carrying the past. Did he do this last time? How often have I explained? He knows what matters to me. What has happened between us before? Facts rarely arrive alone; history, expectations, promises, and accumulated emotion follow them. These matter. Without the past, the present may be hard to understand. Yet the past is powerful enough to decide today’s meaning before today has unfolded. A silence has barely begun before every earlier silence returns. A remark has no chance to be explained before we know what it “means again.” Many conflicts arise less from too few facts than from meaning arriving too quickly.