"If they loved me, they'd know"

This sentence is the centre of the habit, and you may never have said it aloud. It connects two things. One is how much someone cares about you. The other is how accurately they can tell what's going on inside you without being told. The belief is that the first produces the second. Love should make a person perceptive. So if they fail to perceive, it means they don't love you enough.

Therapists who work with couples have recognised this belief for a long time. In the early 1980s Eidelson and Epstein built a questionnaire to measure beliefs that cause trouble in relationships, and one of its five parts was the expectation that partners should be able to read each other's minds. Researchers have used it ever since. Courtney Wright and Michael Roloff, summing up that body of work in 2015, say that people who hold mind reading expectations often have less satisfying relationships. Their own study is described in chapter 12.

That's an association, and it could run either way. Perhaps unhappy couples come to expect mind reading because they've stopped talking. But consider the logic of the belief, because I think it fails before any data come into it.

Caring about someone and knowing what they're thinking are different abilities. The first is a matter of what you want for them. The second is a matter of information. Your partner can want your happiness with their whole heart and still not know that Tuesday's meeting is still eating at you on Sunday, because nothing visible has told them. The most devoted parent can't tell why a baby is crying and has to work through the possibilities. Nobody concludes from this that the parent doesn't love the baby.

Turn it round, and think of someone you love. Could you say, right now, what they most need from you this week? You may have a guess. Chapter 8 will look at how good such guesses tend to be. If you're not certain, that doesn't mean your love is deficient. It means you're not inside their head.

So the link doesn't hold. Someone who loves you will want to know what you need, and will generally act on it once they do. That doesn't give them any way of finding it out unless you tell them.

There's something kinder to notice here as well. If the verdict is wrong, and their not knowing doesn't mean they don't care, then a good many evenings like Sunday have been spent grieving over something that hadn't happened. They did care. They were in the next room, puzzled, doing the online shop.