Why the reading seems right

Before I argue with the reading, I want to say what it does for you, because it isn't nothing and you're not a fool for making it.

Sometimes it is about you. Your manager has, at least once, sent a short email because there was a problem with your work. Your partner has, at least once, been quiet at dinner because of something you did. The reading has been right, and a habit that's been right is hard to give up.

It's alert. A person who notices moods is a person who's paying attention, and the alternative seems to be the colleague who never notices anything, who talks over the quiet dinner and misses every signal in the room. You'd rather be the one who notices.

It protects. If the short email is a warning, you'd rather know now than on Thursday. The reading is an early warning system, and early warnings are worth some false alarms.

It's what caring people do. Reading the moods of the people close to you is part of being close to them. Someone who took their partner's silence as nothing to do with them would seem, from the inside, to be someone who didn't care.

You've been right before, and you remember the times you were. The times you were wrong mostly went unrecorded, because you never found out, and the evening ended and the next day they were fine and you moved on.

The memory works in the reading's favour too. The time the short email really was a warning is filed and easy to reach, because it had a Thursday attached to it. The forty times a short email was just short have no ending and no file, because nothing happened and nothing was learned. So when you consult your experience, your experience says the reading is often right, and your experience is a record of the hits with the misses left out.

And it feels like sensitivity. You're a person who picks things up. It's a quality, not a fault, and a book that wants to change it can seem to be asking you to be coarser.

There are needs under all of this. A need to know where you stand. A need not to be blindsided. A need to be the kind of person who notices. A need to matter enough to be the cause of things. Those are real, and the method later in the book is built to meet them better than the reading does. What I'll show is that the reading isn't sensitivity. It's a specific error with a measured direction, and that the noticing you value is a different act from the conclusion you draw, and can be kept while the conclusion goes.