What it costs them

Chapter 3 made the point that people know what's been said to them. Here's the other half of it. They live on what's been said to them. Your partner's picture of what you think of them is built entirely from the said version, and if the said version is the car and the bins, that's the picture.

Sara Algoe, Barbara Fredrickson and Shelly Gable published a study in 2013 in which couples came into a lab and expressed gratitude to each other, one thanking the other for something. The researchers then followed the couples for six months. What predicted the relationship getting better over those months was how responsive the person on the receiving end felt their partner had been in that exchange, how understood and cared for. And that prediction held separately from two other kinds of emotional conversation the same couples had in the lab. Being on the receiving end of your partner's good opinion, in other words, did something that other close conversations didn't.

That study is about thanks, which is book 42's ground, and I'm extending it to the compliment. I think the extension is reasonable because what the receiving partner was responding to wasn't the deed being thanked for. It was the sense that their partner saw them and thought well of them, and a compliment carries that as directly as thanks does. But it's my extension.

Now think about what the drawer does at the other end, and this is my reasoning rather than a finding. Your partner handled the school call and heard nothing. Not criticism, nothing. From inside your head, nothing meant "that was so obviously good it needs no comment". From inside theirs, nothing means nothing. They don't know if you noticed. They may assume you didn't, or that you'd have done it differently, because that's the shape of what you do say. Over fourteen years of nothing, a person can build a fairly complete picture of not being seen, out of nothing but the absence of the sentences you thought.

Chapter 10's brush-off comes in here. The person who says "don't be daft" when you finally say it is often the person who's built that picture. They've had so little of your good opinion that they don't recognise it when it arrives. That isn't a reason to give up. It's what years of the drawer look like from the receiving end, and the only thing that changes it is more of the said version, said plainly, over time.

The colleague with the slides has a smaller version of this. They'll present again. Whether they think it's worth the effort of being clear depends a bit on whether anyone said anything, and nobody did. You had the sentence. It would have taken ten seconds and cost you nothing, and they went back to their desk not knowing it existed.