Many times in therapy, I see couples where one partner drops hints for the other, in terms of what s/he would like for a birthday gift, or during sex, or just in the course of a normal day. The husband (it’s sometimes the wife too, but we’ll use husband here for ease of reading) often fails to understand these hints, and the disappointed wife thinks one (or more) of five things:
- He doesn’t love me.
- He is an idiot to not understand that hint, because it was so obvious that even a Martian would understand it.
- I understand all his hints, so I guess I am doing all the emotional work here.
- He loves me in his way but he can’t be bothered expending effort, so he consciously ignored my hint.
- There exists another man in the universe who would pick up on all my hints, and fulfill me emotionally in ways this lummox cannot.
Here is another viewpoint, and one borne out by my experience in couples counseling. The types of people who drop hints and pick up on others’ hints are two things: Highly Sensitive People (HSP’s), and people with preoccupied attachment who grew up with passive aggressive, borderline, or narcissistic parents. When HSP’s are securely attached, they may be happily married to someone who never gets hints, or may have chosen someone who does get hints. But, if there is an HSP who remains in an unhappy, frustrating marriage to someone who just doesn’t “get” them, the odds are high in my experience that this person grew up in a dysfunctional family where they had to walk on eggshells around a parent.
This background makes these HSP’s hyperattuned to people’s “hints,” and nonverbal hints as well. They then go into adulthood with this superpower of being able to always understand when someone is upset, as they had to be this way in order to survive and maintain any type of relationship with their dysfunctional parent. Non-HSP’s who grow up with narcissistic, BPD, or passive aggressive parents often just distance themselves from their parents even in childhood, and grow up avoidant. They have no ability to read their parent’s mind, and their most adaptive choice is to retreat emotionally and become entirely self-sufficient.
But when a self-involved parent (read Children of the Self Absorbed to see if your parent qualifies) has an HSP child, that child often becomes the parent’s confidante and learns to pick up on the most infinitesimal change in the parent’s mood and outlook. Then, this superpower, along with a tendency to find an imago romantic partner that is as frustrating as the parent always was, is carried into adulthood. This creates the perfect storm of a sensitive, insecure person coupled with a big dolt (aka avoidant partner, or just a non-HSP) who doesn’t or won’t pick up on hints.
If you recognize yourself in this description, it may be something very useful to explore more in counseling. It may be that your expectations for perfect, symbiotic accord are not useful or attainable with any partner who would be drawn to you. Remember that another preoccupied attachment HSP is not going to be a good choice for you in the long run; you would both be too sensitive and easily upset to function. Your choices are often between non-HSP’s and securely attached HSP’s, neither of whom will pick up on hints to the extent that an HSP from a dysfunctional background will. Send this article to your non-HSP partner and openly ask them to schedule a time to discuss it with you! (No hints!!) And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Hints Are For Inspector Gadget.