"If I stop, I'll miss it when it is about me"

This is the fear that keeps the reading in place, and it's a reasonable one. If you stop reading the moods, you'll walk into Thursday's meeting unprepared. You'll miss the signal that your partner is unhappy until it's too late. The reading is a cost, but it's insurance.

Geraldine Downey and Scott Feldman, in 1996, studied a trait they called rejection sensitivity, which is the disposition to anxiously expect rejection, readily see it, and react strongly to it. In one experiment, people high in it perceived intentional rejection in behaviour that was deliberately ambiguous, where others didn't. In a study of new couples, those who'd entered the relationship anxiously expecting rejection saw it in their partner's ordinary insensitivities. And in the final study, rejection-sensitive people and their partners were both less satisfied with the relationship, and the researchers could trace the dissatisfaction to the things the reading produced. Jealousy in the men. Hostility and less support in the women. The reading wasn't protecting those relationships. It was one of the things wearing them down.

I'd put that against the insurance idea. Insurance pays out when the bad thing happens. The reading pays out nothing when your partner is unhappy with you, because you'll still have to find out what about, and the reading can't tell you. What it does is make you behave, on the evenings when nothing is wrong, as though something is. Cooler, warier, hurt about a thing that didn't happen. And a partner who's met that a few dozen times learns something about how they're being watched.

So the fear has it backwards. You won't miss it when it's about you, because when it's about you, you can ask, and people who are unhappy with you will mostly tell you when asked plainly. What the reading costs is all the evenings when it wasn't about you and you behaved as though it was. The check protects you. The reading doesn't. It just feels like it does, because it's always on.