Understanding bonds, your own included

Two people can want the same thing and separate because they do not want it at the same moment. It is one of the most frequent disagreements, and the worst formulated.

The word covers at least three different experiences, which do not call for the same responses. Confusing them is a regular source of conversations that go nowhere.

One waits for words, the other produces few and compensates with deeds. Both are attached in the same way, and each finds the other distant.

We judge our relationship against those we believe we are observing. The problem is that we are not comparing what we think we are comparing.

To be understood, to be approved of, to obtain a decision: three different requests that the same conversation claims to satisfy. They are not obtained the same way.

Believing that a successful relationship is recognisable from the start protects against a bad choice and costs dearly afterwards. Two opposing ways of conceiving a couple, and what is known about them.

Every couple runs on a contract nobody wrote or reread. Its clauses are discovered the day one of the two breaches them.

Almost every couple declares itself in favour, and the timetables tell another story. The gap is not explained by hypocrisy.

We reread the first weeks the way we reread a detective novel, looking for clues. Most of them were not clues.

Dates, rituals and conventional gestures are readily mocked. Yet they fulfil a precise function, and their absence is noticed more than their presence.

French uses a single term where other languages had four. This economy of vocabulary produces part of the misunderstandings attributed to people.