ESP

Perhaps the compaint I hear most often in this relationship is: “You’re not listening!” This is often accompanied by these statements:

• “Just listen to my words!”
• “Clear your mind of preconceptions and listen!”
• “I feel lonely and diminished and discounted when you don’t listen.”

These statements are usually triggered by my failure to perfectly execute her instructions, usually because the instructions are ambiguous or unclear. After receiving the criticisms, I try to explain why I misunderstand her instructions, but that never works, of course. To her, all of her instructions are perfectly clear and easy to understand. She seems to have no concept that my mental models and knowledge are different from hers.

This is especially apparent when she tries to have me fetch something from one of our basement freezers, which she has organized herself, and which she knows much better than I do. When I open the freezer door, I see shelf upon shelf of vegetables in bags that all look alike, and whose labels are obscured by ice or missing. When I report back about my failure to find the item, she tells me, “It’s perfectly obvious! Just listen to my words next time!” Then she demonstrates my failure to listen and my poor locating skills by fetching the item herself in five seconds flat.

Lately, however, I have discovered that even when her instructions are clear and unambiguous, and I carry them out perfectly, I’ll get criticized for not divining her exact intentions. Here is a recent, almost trivial example of this:

A week ago, she asked me to bring up a couple of empty peanut butter jars from the basement. I heard the word “couple” very clearly, and thought to myself: “That means exactly two jars. I’d better not bring more or less than two, because I’ll get criticized.”

When I returned with the two jars, she expressed annoyance, because apparently she expected me to bring up the entire case of empty jars. She muttered something like, “This is why I get so frustrated with you!” I have learned to never respond to these unfair judgments, so I said nothing and went outside to cool down.

Apparently, I need to have ESP to be able to avoid criticism, since I can’t seem to get things right even when the instructions seem clear. I need to be able to divine exactly what she needs, whether or not the instructions are ambiguous.

To me, this kind of ESP would be a boundary violation as serious as her pretending that she knows my thoughts and motives when she’s angry about something I’ve done. I recall a “discussion” last year about this, where I said, “Just tell me what you need! I can’t always figure it out on my own.” To this, she responded, “But you always used to be able to know what I wanted without my asking!”

This seems like yet another predicament, that is: a problem that can NOT be solved, except by leaving.