It took me so long to learn this. My ex was just as passive aggressive and emotion driven as I am, so we were just in an echo chamber of passive-aggressiveness and expecting the other to read our minds. I made the effort to anticipate his needs but he never did the same for me.

It wasn’t until I got in a relationship with mr. Omoikiri that I realised how irrational that mindset is. Maybe it’s because he’s an engineer and very solutions-driven or maybe it’s because English is his second language and just didn’t pick up on the cues I was throwing out, but eventually he was like “this isn’t working. I can’t read your mind. We can’t address problems if you don’t tell me that there’s a problem.” It was like a slap in the face in the best possible way.

Sometimes it’s so frustrating and I just want him to instinctively know what I need because how can he not see it, but only we know what’s going on in our brains and emotions and only we can speak for them. So we need to because otherwise no one else will and you’ll just drown in it.