It is very easy to misread what a spouse or significant other is saying. The older I get, the more insightful I think the song above is. Here is the the refrain:

She said "I'm mad"
He heard "I'm leaving"
She said "I need your attention"
He heard "I want you to crawl"
She said "I'm sad"
He heard "It's all your fault"
There is no translation
Emotions don't fit into words
There's so much between what she
And what he heard

Let me write from the perspective of someone who often misunderstands their partner in such a way.

Sometimes, what is going on is this: you don’t want to face a medium-sized unpleasant truth about yourself, so you pretend your partner is saying something much worse, which allows you to be indignant that you would be accused of something so obviously not true. The downside: in addition to keeping you from letting in the genuine feedback, part of you might really get snookered by this pretense and feel awful at what you are supposedly being accused of.

Other times, your partner genuinely has difficulty articulating what bothers them accurately. For example, they may use totalizing words such as “always” or “never.” Unfortunately, it is always necessary to translate from any infelicity in how your partner says things. You can ask them to say things in a way that is more accurate, but most people don’t manage to change such things very fast. So you might need to be patient.

Other Valentine’s Day Posts:

• Marriage 101

• Marriage 102

• Marriage 103

• Marriage—Not for the Faint of Heart

• The Four Horsemen of Relationship Destruction