"They should have said if it wasn't about me"

There's a complaint under some readings, and it's aimed at the other person. If the quiet wasn't about you, they could have said so. A word at the door. "Bad day, nothing to do with you." They didn't, so either it was about you or they didn't care enough to say.

Look at it from their side of the table. Your partner came home with a bad day and sat down to dinner and was quiet. From where they sit, nothing happened. They were tired. They didn't make a face at you or say a sharp word. They ate dinner. The idea that a reading was made, that you'd concluded something and were now waiting for it to be denied, is not available to them, because the reading happened inside you and made no sound.

So "they should have said" asks them to deny a thing they don't know was asserted. It asks them to manage a process they can't see, and then holds the silence against them as further evidence. That isn't fair to them, and more to the point it doesn't work, because the people you live with will never reliably announce the cause of every mood, and if that's the condition for you not taking it personally, you'll take everything personally for the rest of your life.

An earlier book in this series is about the mirror image of this habit, expecting the people close to you to know what you need without being told. It's named in the notes. This chapter is the same argument the other way round. They can't read that you've made a reading, any more than you can read what's in their head, and the same fix applies, which is that things get said out loud by the person who wants them known. If you want to know whether it was about you, that's you. The check is chapter 20.