Everyone understands what we want, but not our partner - why?

The party goes on for quite a while, and sometimes, when she sees her husband out of the corner of his eye, he yawns heartily. Once, when they are standing side by side at the buffet, she says, "This is a really great party, is not it?", And her husband replies, "Yeah, just a pity that I'm so tired." Two hours later, on the way home, he reproaches her: "You have noticed that I wanted to go, you know, when I have to get out tomorrow morning!" She is a bit surprised, yes, annoyed. Why did not he say anything? He shakes his head impatiently and says, "Strangers to whom I have told them what I have for a day tomorrow have asked me if they should take me with them, and my own wife does not understand me." Then he sleeps in the living room. Because he has to get out early.

Strangely enough, that happens often, even in friendships or in the family: the people who know us best seem to understand us the least. Mom, you can imagine that I can not stay long, why are you cooking three courses and inviting Aunt Gisela! Guys, you know that I like to sleep and lazy on vacation, and you're planning one trip after another!

What makes one angry about this is not just the often really vain cause (to come home too late, to get cooked too much, to be prevented from lounging), but a higher-order injury: the feeling of not being understood by the people, which one is closest to. Conversely, with such a close person, the disproportionately unpleasant impression of having been treated unfairly remains because: The one or the other did not say anything! Are we mind readers then?

The waiter, we also explain exactly what we want to eat

Boaz Kayser, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, summarizes this in a simple sentence: "Proximity makes people overestimate how well they communicate." His colleagues have published in the "Journal of Experimental Psychology" a study of this phenomenon in which they conclude: We believe that we communicate better with people who are close to us than with complete strangers, but that's not true , In one of their experiments, for example, twenty-four women and men should first explain a difficult, ambiguous sentence to their spouse and then to a stranger. Everyone thought afterwards that they had explained the sentence well to their partner, and that their partner would have understood it better than the stranger, but the opposite was unfortunately the case: everyone had communicated better with the stranger than with their partner. The culprit is the so-called "closeness-communication bias", for example: communication distorted by proximity. What happens is described by the scientists as follows: Any communication between two people is impaired by the fact that we are self-centered at first. In other words, we know what we mean. But assuming that others do not know, we try to make it clear. However, the closer we are to each other, the more we assume that he or she needs to be closer to our egocentric perspective, and the less effort we make to communicate clearly with him or her.

Simple example: When the waiter comes in the restaurant, I say exactly what I want to eat, and sometimes even instinctively point my finger at the line in the menu to avoid misunderstandings. But if I have to go to the bathroom before the waiter comes with the card, I say to my companion: "Order it, you know what I want." Because I said an hour ago that I have an appetite for pizza, and because I always order Pizza Funghi when we go to the Italian together. From the waiter, I would never expect that he knows that, that would be egocentric in an almost insane way. But with my good friend or my wife, I unconsciously expect that they can think that.

Till Raether writes regularly in ChroniquesDuVasteMonde on psychological issues and thus also on partnership. His years of "field research" have made him an expert - not only in questions of communication.

What you can perhaps put away with a little squabble, if one of the partners instead of pizza Funghi ordered the scampi-pan from the day's menu ("They should be so good!" - "Yes, they probably have to go away.) You know that me ... "etc.). But the problem of communication getting worse, the greater the closeness, naturally leads to much more complex and critical situations.The man who at some point confesses an affair and says in justification: "Come on, you've just realized how unhappy I've been in our relationship for years." The best friend who broke off contact because her friend had sex with a man she was unfortunate enough to love years ago, "You know I never got over Mirko."

Sure, you might notice, you could know it, but these conflicts always arise when the other one presupposes a whole lot, namely a familiarity and an intuition that are equally strong in a relationship but not all the time. Besides, it has something very sobering: we explain ourselves to strangers, and to our loved ones we make ourselves as comfortable as possible in communication.

And the alarm signal is possibly the word "yet", which always falls when someone understands one, but know it, but it should know better. But? No. It is again the romantic fairytale of the two hearts that beat like one, and the partners who understand each other without words. To put it more positively, one can perhaps learn something from it: talk to those you love as well as to strangers. At least as carefully and precisely.