Your Partner Cannot Know What Is Wrong Unless You Tell Them

Midway through a talk on why marriage so often disappoints, Alain de Botton, a philosopher who writes about everyday emotional life, turned to a scene every couple knows. One partner says something thoughtless, the other goes cold, and then comes the exchange.

He put the definition simply. We do not sulk with just anyone, he said. We sulk "with people who we feel should understand us and yet for some reason have decided not to."

His point was that we carry a childlike idea of love into adulthood. Just as a young child assumes a parent will guess what is in its mind, we believe that the more right a lover is for us, the less we should need to put our inner lives into words. Using words feels cumbersome and unromantic, so we hold onto the touching hope that we will simply be understood wordlessly.

That hope, he said, produces the familiar ritual. Asked what is wrong, the wounded lover says, "Nothing," then insists, "I'm absolutely fine." He or she goes upstairs, shuts the door, and waits to be pursued, wanting the other person to read the soul without being told. He called that expectation "a catastrophe for our capacity to form lasting relationships," adding that "if you do not explain, you can never be understood."

The alternative he proposed was unglamorous. The root of a good marriage, he argued, is becoming a good teacher, someone able to get "an idea from one head into another in a way that is likely to be accepted." To teach well, he said, you need to be relaxed, and to accept that your partner may not understand at first.