Your partner has been short with you for weeks and says nothing is wrong.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- Whether you ask once, calmly, and then let it rest.Asking is yours, continuing to ask becomes pressing. The first time opens a door; the fifth turns you into an additional problem.
- Which story you make out of the silence.Nearly everyone stumbles here. From the same silence you can conclude that she no longer loves you or that she is tired. Both are inventions until you know, and you choose which one you inhabit.
- Whether you keep doing the ordinary things.Making coffee, eating together, talking normally. Anyone who lets the house go cold while waiting makes the silence larger than it was.
Not yours
- Whether she tells you what is going on.Her pace and her words. Some people need weeks first, and those weeks cannot be shortened by pulling harder.
- That it makes you insecure.Being met with curtness and no explanation leaves you filling in the blanks; that is human. The insecurity is the first movement, what you do with the filling in is the second.
- What the cause is.Work, health, family, you, something she cannot put a finger on herself. Guessing costs energy and provides no answer.
The reasoning. In relationships it nearly always goes wrong at one point: the story you make out of the other person's behaviour gets treated as an observation. It is not, it is your own work. The cut puts that work visibly in the right column, next to the two other things you can do: ask once, and refuse to suspend the ordinary days while you wait for an answer.
- Be silent for the most part, or say what is necessary, and in few words.Epictetus
Nearby situations
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