Your guy has been acting strangely lately.
He seems distracted. He’s not as affectionate. He doesn’t seem to want to spend as much time together.
You worry that his feelings for you are cooling. If that’s the case, you need to act fast to save your relationship.
How do you find out what’s really going on inside his head?
Do you:
- Decode his body language. Pay particular attention to cues that suggest he’s lying when he says he loves you.
- Trust your intuition. You know him better than anyone. If your gut says that your relationship is in trouble, then it’s in trouble.
- Get a second opinion. Tell your girlfriends what’s going on and get their take. Even better, talk to one of his guy friends and ask if he’s said anything to them.
- Ask him. Tell him that you notice he’s been distracted and ask why.
Only one of these options delivers reliable results each and every time.
Let’s find out which one it is!
Body language guides are incredibly popular.
Pay attention to the direction he points his feet, the microexpressions that flash across his face, or the angle of his body, and you’ll know the truth about how he feels.
There’s only one problem…
Body language is not the most reliable guide to how he’s feeling.
Research finds that people are much better at concealing their true emotions than body language experts would like to believe.
Even body language experts aren’t much better at guessing who’s telling the truth and who isn’t than the average person.
Focus overmuch on body language, and you’ll miss an even richer source of information about how he’s feeling:
His voice.
If you pay close attention to what he’s saying and how he’s saying it—pitch, volume, pauses—you’ll understand his feelings with greater accuracy than if you tuned out his words and focused just on body language.
But maybe your guy isn’t talking, so you need a different strategy.
You know him better than anyone. Sometimes it feels like you know him better than he knows himself! Maybe if you just tuned into your intuition, you would find out the truth.
Trust Your Gut
Social psychologist William Ickes studies empathic accuracy, our ability to understand what others think and feel through empathy.
He’s found that strangers can understand each other with about 20% accuracy.
Close friends and married couples understand each other better.
How much better?
If you’re close to someone, you can expect to be about 35% accurate in understanding what they think and feel.
That means you’re still wrong about tw0-thirds of the time!
And you may not even realize it.
Studies show that couples are too certain of their ability to understand each other.
When researchers gave couples a list of 20 questions and asked them to make their best guess about what their partner thinks on a range of topics, couples got about 5 questions right. [1]
When asked how many question they thought they guessed correctly, they predicted they’d answered at least 12 question right.
The longer they’d been together, the more confident they were.
But that confidence bore no relation to their accuracy.
So don’t assume you know him well enough to guess what he’s thinking. He’s the only expert on his mind.
Ask a Friend
Left to our own devices, we tend to take other people’s behavior personally.
Why is he doing what he’s doing? It must be because of us.
He’s not affectionate because he’s not feeling the love. He’s distracted because he’s half-out of the relationship. He’s not spending as much time together because he wants out.
That’s where friends can be valuable sources of feedback.
Friends are more objective. They can see a bigger picture.
But friends also lack a lot of information. They only know what you tell them. Even his friends only know what he’s been telling them.
This makes them unreliable guides to what’s really going on inside a man’s heart and mind.
There’s one big problem with asking him.
Would he really tell you the truth?
If he’s slowly going off the relationship, there’s no way he would tell you.
No guy wants to deliver bad news. Even if it’s just that they ate the last slice of pizza.
But here’s the thing…
No relationship can succeed unless you can speak honestly to one another.
If there are things you can’t ask him, those walls will keep you apart.
Relationships thrive when you are able to share the honest truth.
And that takes work.
One of the best investments you can make in your relationship is not to learn how to be a better mindreader.
It’s to find out how to create a safe space to communicate almost anything.
When he knows that you care about him, you’re not going to fly off the handle, and you really want to know his perspective, he’s much more likely to open up.
That takes practice. It takes having those kinds of conversations over and over again.
But you’re less likely to initiate those conversations if you’re used to reading his mind. You don’t even think to ask what he feels, because you believe you already know.
The only reliable way to find out what he’s thinking is to ask him.
Ask in a way that makes it safe for him to be honest. When he trusts you, he will tell you.
And he may just say that he’s got a lot going on at work. No need to panic. Good thing you asked instead of assuming, because now you can give him that extra support he needs.
[1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/spring-2014/misunderstanding-what-others-think-believe-feel-and-want
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