Conflicting signals

My husband and I have discovered a new guilty pleasure from Netflix: it's a British comedy called Coupling, about 6 people in their early 30's, dealing with the challenges of dating and aging. Sounds trite, I'm sure, but it really makes us laugh, we got a HUGE kick out of watching it with our daughter, and it's triggered some interesting discussions about what our lives were like before we met (in our early 30's).

It seems to me that one of the most common problems these folks face -- and probably most everyone in relationship faces -- is conflicting signals. I don't know about you, but I tend to assume the confusion stems from the fact that the other person doesn't know what they want, but this image cropped up this morning to remind me that it's not always the fault of the person giving off the signals.

Sometimes we have trouble reading people because something -- previous experience, or expectations, or just a simple trick of the light -- is obscuring our vision, so we just can't discern what they're trying to tell us. All the possibilities are there, and sometimes we just can't quite tell which is the one that's specifically being communicated.

Which is probably a good thing for me to remember when I find myself grousing about someone not being very clear about what they want or need from me. It might not always be them; it may be that I've got something clouding my own perceptions...