Whatever the relationship we are observing, there is much more that we don’t know than what we know.

That’s true for the relationship with life, others, and ourselves. In life, we seek to understand the rules, with ourselves, it is the unconscious that hides knowledge away. With others, it is a different frame of reference than ours. They had other experiences, could be in a different mood, learned other rules, came to different conclusions while learning, and were confronted with other facts than us.

We don’t know what they believe, know, and want, and they don’t know how it is for us.

The shortcut is to assume that it is the same.

The shortcut is to assume that how we make sense of a situation is also how others do it.

But it isn’t.

It’s a somewhat intriguing situation that a shared relationship creates a shared context that is different for all those involved. The events may be the same, but the thoughts and feelings related to them will not be the same, even those that are similar.

Discovering the presence of differences, we may try to uncover them, understand them, or otherwise close the knowledge gap. But that’s a futile effort as the relationship constantly evolves.

What’s more useful is to accept that we can’t know it all. Once that idea is integrated, it becomes easy to regularly seek to align one’s actions and to accept that conflicts occur when there wasn’t enough time available to align and verify objectives.