‘My partner doesn’t understand me’: Individuals, couples and misunderstanding Abstract Having one's intentions properly understood is important to a sense of individuality that is important (in varying degrees) for all or most of us. Because people tend to care a great deal about what their partners are thinking and feeling, they also tend to interpret their words and actions for signs to reassure them or to confirm their suspicions. Since there is good reason to suppose that individuals are sometimes mistaken about their intentions and good reason to suppose that someone's partner can often see things about him/her that he/she doesn't see, there is no reason to suppose, when an individual's understanding of her intentions is at odds with his/her partner's interpretation, that his/her understanding is correct. For this reason, misunderstanding is a persistent feature of the couple relationship, and in ways that persistently challenge a person's sense of individuality within it. There may be many benefits to individuals in being in a couple, but mutual understanding will, often enough, not be one of them.
Word count: 3538 To live and understand oneself as an individual requires among other things that one can act intentionally, and that one’s intentions are to some extent understood by others. Being understood by others depends on their cooperation. The problem I want to talk about concerns that dependency. There are those who will say that there is a problem with understanding one another’s intentions that is prior to the problem I want to talk about: intentions involve meanings, and meanings are indeterminate and unstable. We should therefore abandon the idea of authorial authority in respect of what is said and done, and with it any it any strong notion of individual integrity. What is meant by this is far from clear. Certainly if it means anything, one who affirms it ought to be able to say what it would mean to live and act as if this were true. If they cannot say what that would involve, what changes it entails for how we act and how we talk, then there is considerable doubt about whether the claim really means anything. As for myself, and I suspect for most others, I am an individual and it matters to me that my actions and intentions be properly understood. It is a familiar criticism of liberal political theory that it overemphasises and distorts
the importance of the individual, of individualism and of individuality. I agree. All I would argue is that, as I have said, a sense of one’s own individuality and individual integrity is important. It may be more important for some than for others. The scope and importance of the sense of individuality is constrained and affected by various cultural, gender and class influences. But that it is important for most people, in some degree, can scarcely be denied. And that entails that for most people it is important that their intentions, words and actions are usually interpreted and understood as they would wish them to be. Of course, no one can hope always to be understood just as they would wish to be. And it would probably be a bad thing if we always were. But there is a tolerable limit for most of us to misunderstanding ourselves and being misunderstood by others. I want to argue that being in a couple necessarily tends to push misunderstanding beyond the limit. To seek understanding of and by one’s partner is often to fight a loosing battle. Why? In many ordinary routines and activities, and in most of our dealings with others, meanings and intentions can often be taken for granted. We don’t need to worry that a note to the milkman asking for one pint less this week will be interpreted as a waning of interest. Nor need we trouble ourselves about hurting the feelings of drivers we overtake on the motorway (most of the time). Things get complicated when our actions noticeably affect what others want, or when their actions affect what we want. Then we start to wonder whether we want the same things, whether we agree, whether we are loved and so on. When motives become suspect and sought for, actions must be interpreted. It is within couples, by and large, that actions touch most on our cares, and interpretation is a constant presence. If I don’t do what you want me to, if I am more or less affectionate than you would wish me to be, and if in general I don’t live up to your expectations, then you may begin to watch and reflect on other more innocuous and less remarkable things I do for signs to reassure you or to confirm your suspicions. I can of course try to reassure you (assuming I know of your suspicions) that my actions were innocent or that they meant
something else. But I may only be saying that so as not to frighten you off, or to let you down gently. And anyway, why should you assume that I know what I’m doing. I may be hiding from myself or suppressing my real feelings. To be involved with someone is to be intimately interested in and engaged by them; and that means noticing things about them that they themselves are unaware of and seeing them from a perspective they can only have second–hand access to. If I am involved with you, and if I am at least half–way sensitive, I will know things about you that you don’t know about yourself. So knowing that, why should I take your word for it when you say you didn’t mean to snub me? That takes trust. Trust is usually based on experience and commitment. We trust our partners because they have been reliable in the past, because they have made commitments and given undertakings, because they would not want to lose our trust, and because we love them. If we didn’t know it already, it would be clear enough from all this that trust is fragile: the things trust rests on all themselves require trust. Trust is a precarious state of being. We draw on a common stock of tales and experiences that tell us that apparently reliable people—good people—often turn out to be unreliable, that you only ever think you know someone, and that people change. If we are given cause to doubt someone’s intentions, neither commitments nor past reliability will be enough to maintain trust in them. Trust within a couple depends most therefore on love and our own sense of commitment to the one we trust. We trust because we want to trust, because it is right to trust, and because we ourselves want to be trusted. Trust is both a state of mind, therefore, and a way of behaving. It is a state of being. I can trust you either by behaving as if you are worthy of trust or by believing in you. And if I don’t fully trust you in the second way, I can attempt to build on that by the first. But while I want to trust you, I also need to know that I can trust you, and I find it difficult to ignore the things you do that cause me to doubt you. Trust is most secure when we our we are too engaged in activities and plans to wonder too much about what might be going on under our noses: in other words, when it is least required. But when something happens to jolt us out of complacency,
we begin to look to evidence and motive rather than trust. And that tends to happen a lot within couples. I don’t mean that people in couples are always being given cause to worry about being cuckolded. Trust is concerned with shared values, mutual support, considerateness, not keeping secrets, money, parity of labour and effort, as well as sexual fidelity, and it can be threatened and undermined in various ways and degrees. Because our partners are intimately interested in us, and because they often know us better in some respects than we know ourselves, we cannot avoid giving them cause for doubts and questions. This is not a state of affairs that can always – or mostly – be remedied or improved by talk or counselling, and certainly not through greater intimacy. It goes with the territory. People in couples care about each other and about what each other does and says. To expect them to shrug of their doubts and questions is in effect to expect them not to care. Therefore because our partners have questions about us, fuelled by hopes and expectations, they interpret what we do; and their interpretations can be at odds with our real intentions, or with our own interpretations of our intentions. Our actions get misunderstood. Or sometimes they are understood well enough, only we ourselves don’t see it like that. Being in a couple, therefore, means being in a relationship that inevitably challenges one’s sense of individuality by persistently causing or revealing misunderstanding of one’s intentions. People can and do of course talk about their misunderstandings and sometimes succeed in overcoming them, but the nature of relationships within couples tends against it, and for some of the same reasons, unsurprisingly that it undermines trust. My explanations may be rationalisations. My reassurances may be insincere. And I may be self–deceiving. Someone attempting to correct her partner’s misunderstandings can find herself confronted by descriptions of her actions, and by reminders of forgotten remarks, which add up to a scenario in which she can hardly recognise herself. A myriad of seemingly unrelated details is woven together into a narrative that has a bewildering coherence and force, so that she finds herself lost about where to begin replying and unsure of her ground. She may only partly recall why she did this or said
that, and she may have to piece together her explanations with post hoc inferences. And then her own explanations, for all their truth, will feel to her like rationalisations. She may even begin to doubt her own convictions about what she meant and intended, perhaps with good reason, or she remain firm in them but be so stymied and swamped by the details of her partner’s complaints and questions that she finds herself unable to articulate her objections. One thinks of oneself as decent and considerate, and one is somehow robbed of that by the very person one most wants to believe it. One becomes instead, and despite one’s best intentions, something other than or inferior to what one takes oneself to be. When misunderstanding arises, one way of trying to remove it is to disengage from complaint and accusation, and to detail and itemise the points of disagreement so that they can be discussed and assessed dispassionately. But since particular descriptions of a disagreement can be seen as favouring the view of one party to it, such descriptions can easily end up being as sharply contested as the substantive points of disagreement they were supposed to help us move beyond. Often enough, all that is accomplished from such attempts to build understanding are understandings that are essentially tacit agreements to differ. Our partners learn to live with their disappointments, and with our inability to understand their substance. Either such misunderstandings periodically reerrupt, or they calcify, so that each partner comes, over time, to have a fixed picture of the other, which is unattuned to change and diversity. As a consequence, within a long term relationship, a person’s sense of individuality is liable to be pushed out by routines and expectations. What she retains of her sense of individuality has to be outside and at the expense of her relationship. Divorce statistics notwithstanding, however, many people remain with their partners for many years, often for life. Many people see their relationships to their partners as the most fulfilling and indispensable aspect of their lives. If their individuality is something they care about, and if it is undermined by being in a couple, how and why do so many remain in couples? What I have been arguing will be seen by some as
distorted, pessimistic, paranoid or cynical. They will say that people often succeed in building enduringly trusting relationships, and even ones of deep mutual understanding. I don’t deny that this happens, between people who are naturally trusting and whose wants and values are very well matched. But I think that what happens very often is that misunderstandings are set aside, repressed or built around. Over time, relationships develop into elaborate structures of modus vivendi, and trust comes to depend on lowered expectations and a familiarity with perceived patterns of behaviour and motives. To be sure, people can live with all of this enough to sometimes continue to like and even love one another, and even to find a certain fulfilment in familiarity, but they are mistaken if they think that what they have is mutual understanding. To be in a couple is constantly to have one’s actions interpreted and treated as significant in ways that one does not intend, and cannot plan for or adequately respond to. It is an unending cause of frustration to individuality. The same can be true of many other relationships one has, to one’s parents, siblings and children, to one’s friends and one’s colleagues. But such relationships can change and adapt in ways that the couple relationship cannot. Perhaps this is because being in a couple is not based primarily on some familial obligation or some common purpose, and that in consequence couples are self–focusing relationships where some prior obligation or aim cannot serve as a marker for how to proceed. If a colleague’s behaviour gives you cause to doubt their sincerity, good will or integrity, and discussing the grievance with them does not convince that your misgivings about them are mistaken, you may try to come to terms with this by limiting your dealings with them to the minimal requirements of professional norms and practices. Or if your grown up child’s actions lead you to regard them as characteristically self–centred and spiteful, you may seek to restructure your relationship with him or her by falling back on your obligations to them as a parent while keeping a degree of personal distance from them. In non–western forms of marriage there are often well–defined roles, obligations and norms that can bear the weight of a relationship that has otherwise proved to be disappointing or unsatisfying because, say, a spouse’s behaviour has
given reason to suppose that they are not the person one took them to be or that they are otherwise than one wants them to be. The various forms of the western couple relationship also involve social norms and obligations, but falling back on those norms and obligations when more direct personal involvement disappoints and frustrates tends in general to be a far less satisfactory than with the other kinds of relationship I have mentioned. The reason for this is that, although there is considerable diversity in the forms the couple relationship can take, in general it involves a defining reciprocal commitment of one person to another as a person, which is to say, the defining commitment is to a distinctive and unique individual, including the various characteristics that make this person distinctive and unique. This brings me back to the issue of individuality. It has been put to me that my argument that the couple relationship frustrates individuality is too pessimistic, and that it is often the case that a person’s sense of individuality is sustained, enabled and enhanced by his or her partner. As individuals we often loose confidence in our individual worth, or lose sight of our special attributes and qualities, and it is often our partner who knows enough and cares enough to remind us of our value, and who can even reveal qualities and potentials in us which we ourselves have failed to notice or have been prevented from seeing. The different perspective a partner has on an individual’s character and behaviour can take in strengths just as much as failings. I think this is true, and also that it shows up the importance for the couple relationship of commitment to one’s partner as an individual and to his or her uniqueness and potential. But I don’t think this gets over the problem I have identified. Taking the trouble to remind one’s partner of his or her individual worth and distinctiveness is motivated by regard and a desire for their well–being, and by our wanting them to know that we care about them and value them, but we also want to know, and need them to show, that they care about us; as well as needing to know that we have shared values, shared commitments, etc. And it is this need for reciprocal demonstration of love, care and shared values which leads, as I have argued, to interpretation,
misinterpretation and frustration of one’s need to be understood in something like the way one understands oneself. The dependency between one’s sense of one’s own individuality and being understood by others, moreover, isn’t only strained and frustrated by misinterpretation—or what is perceived as misinterpretation—of our words and actions, but by a related failure to recognise—or again, a perceived failure to recognise—in those words and actions, our development and potential: what we are capable of becoming as much as what we are. We need to be understood by others, but we need or want it most of all from our partners. If our parents, or our children, or our colleagues, or even our friends fail to see us as we want to be seen, and fail to understand us as we wish to be understood; if we feel that their view of us is a caricature or two–dimensional, we can often cope with that by falling back, as I have suggested, on the norms and obligations that govern proper dealings within those kinds of relationships, and provided also that our needs for recognition and understanding are satisfied elsewhere. But when we are faced with that lack of recognition and understanding from a partner, not only will the sense of disappointment and frustration be far sharper than with those other kinds of relationship, but to cope with that by falling back on roles, norms and obligations, as well as routines—a process, which, as I have suggested, will often take place incrementally and over time—will be in effect to abandon, in part or in whole, what it is about that kind of relationship that makes it distinctive, which is to say, that it is a relationship of reciprocal commitment of one unique individual to another.
Conclusion I have suggested already that the problem I have attempted to describe has no remedy. What follows from this? That individuals shouldn’t get involved in couples? That the western couple relationship is premised on an illusion or a false ideal? Or that the notion of individuality or individual uniqueness is fundamentally flawed? I wouldn’t want to say any of these things. A sense of individuality and the strength of an
individual’s need for it varies from person to person, so that the problem I have identified will be sharper for some than for others; but all or most of us appear to have some sense of it and some need for it. And most people seem to want or need, at some times in their lives, to be involved with another person in a couple relationship. I have also acknowledged that these relationships can be sustaining, enhancing and enabling. In view of this, it would be perverse to suggest that people should give up their involvements in or their desires for committed relationships. Neither does what I have had to say exhaust all that can usefully be said about the couple relationship, or of its relationship to individuality. If I am right, the problem I have identified has no general resolution, but the strains and frustrations it creates for a person’s need for understanding and sense of individuality ought to be placed in context: alongside various other features, problems and benefits of the couple relationship. I am unsure, therefore, what practical consequences, benefits or possibilities might follow from identification of the problem I have talked about; perhaps only this: that it is better to know and be realistic about the kind of relationship one is involved in or getting into, and the problems that go with it. Perhaps it provides one more reason for scepticism about the social ideal of a commitment for life.
“My partner doesn’t understand me”: postscript
Having first written the paper a couple of years ago, what I’m unsure about is the extent of the problem of interpretation I have talked about and, as I indicated at the end of the paper, what its implications are. The argument was about frustration of one’s sense of individuality resulting from the way one’s actions and intentions are interpreted by one’s partner. Evidently the kinds of contested interpretations I have mentioned don’t go on all of the time within couples. Evidently, also, good things, satisfying things, rewarding things, happen a lot as well. The paper is pessimistic about the problem it explores: do we need to be this pessimistic?
Possibilities
• The kinds of situations that give rise to misinterpretation don’t occur as often as I’m imagining, or perhaps their effects don’t persist in the kinds of ways or to the extent I’ve mentioned. • It is also worth mentioning, in passing, that contested interpretations or misunderstandings within couples are sometimes revelled in and even enjoyed: especially where the contested interpretations relate to various stereotypes that figure strongly in male vs. female badinage. • Perhaps the effects of contested interpretations can be set aside or overcome by couples having, for example, new plans and projects: by what couples, in contrast to the rest of the world, are committed to or agreed on. •
Perhaps, therefore, there are other ways in which the problem can be overcome, other than talking it through.