"They must know by now"

By July you were sure that Sam knew. You'd been quiet on Friday evenings for weeks. You'd said "Fine, have fun" in a tone that seemed to you unmistakable. Once you'd remarked, with a little laugh, that it must be nice to have a hobby. It seemed impossible that anyone could miss it. So when he didn't respond, you concluded that he knew and didn't care.

In the car park he said, "You've never said a word about Saturdays," and he meant it.

Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky and Victoria Medvec have studied this gap. They call it the illusion of transparency. Across several experiments they found that people overestimate how well others can read their inner states. People who were lying thought their lies were more detectable than they were. People who tasted something disgusting while trying to keep a straight face thought their disgust was far more visible to observers than it was. The researchers' explanation is that your own feelings are so loud to you that it's hard to allow for how faint they are from outside. You begin from your own experience and don't adjust far enough.

Those were laboratory tasks between strangers, and a partner of ten years reads you better than a stranger does. But think about what Sam had to go on. He saw you a bit quiet on Friday evenings, which might have been tiredness. He heard "Fine, have fun", and those are the words of someone who's fine. He heard a joke about hobbies, and perhaps he didn't get it. From inside your head, each of these carried the full weight of four months' resentment. From where he stood they were ordinary household moments that could be read six ways, and he took the most convenient of them. Most of us do the same, most of the time.

This is the problem with the hint. A hint is designed to be deniable. You send a signal faint enough that if it's challenged you can say you meant nothing by it. A signal that can be denied can also be missed, and if they're the sort to ignore things, it can be ignored. You've chosen a way of communicating that's built to fail, and then you've taken its failure as proof that the other person doesn't care.

There's research on what indirect complaint does to a relationship over time. James McNulty and Michelle Russell followed newly married couples over several years and coded how they talked about their problems. They separated direct negative behaviour, such as openly blaming or demanding, from indirect negative behaviour. The indirect kind included sarcasm, hostile questions such as "What did I tell you?", and claiming to know what the other person really feels. The direct kind had mixed effects, which I'll come to in chapter 8. The indirect kind didn't. It went with steadily lower satisfaction, however large or small the couple's problems were. The sideways complaint seemed to do harm whenever it was used, and it didn't get anything fixed. The researchers' explanation is that an indirect statement leaves it vague what the partner is supposed to do about it. They didn't study sighs and meaningful silences as such, so extending the point to those is my step.

That fits the mechanism. The hint does deliver the bad feeling. Sam could tell on Friday evenings that the air had cooled. What it doesn't deliver is the information. He got the chill and not the reason. So he had the cost of a complaint without the possibility of doing anything about it, and you had the cost of making one without the possibility of being answered.

This bears on the second grievance I mentioned in chapter 3, the one that goes "and you didn't even notice". It feels like the deeper wound. But it rests on the belief that you'd made yourself clear, and you hadn't. It's hard to hear, and it's also a relief. The person who ignored your obvious distress for four months turns out to be a person who was never told. You may well have a real complaint about Saturdays. The complaint about not noticing is one you can probably put down.

A workable rule is that nothing counts as said until it's been said in words, directly to the person, as a plain statement, at a time when they were listening. A sigh doesn't count, and neither does a remark to their sister. A joke doesn't count, and nor does a pointed silence. If you've done all of those, you still haven't told them.