Seventeen Years of “We Need To” (and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves About Communication)
My husband and I have been together for roughly 1.5 billion years, which is apparently the minimum amount of time required to discover that we do not, in fact, speak the same language.
Not different languages in the obvious way. No one’s conjugating verbs wrong. No one’s mispronouncing words.
Just… entirely different meanings attached to the same sentences.
For most of our relationship, I was baffled by one extremely consistent pattern: whenever I said, “we need to…”—we need to clean the gutters, we need to call the insurance company, we need to add that to the list—he would respond like I had just pulled a fire alarm.
Immediate defensiveness. Irritation. A whole why are you demanding this right now energy.
And I would be standing there thinking: I did not say right now. I didn’t even imply right now. I said “we need to,” which, in my mind, clearly means “this is important-ish and should happen sometime in the near, undefined future when neither of us is on fire.”
Very reasonable. Extremely clear. Obviously universal.
Right?
It took us seventeen years—seventeen—to ask a question that, in hindsight, feels so obvious it should come with a warning label:
When I say we need to do something… what do you think I mean?
His answer:
Immediately. Like, right now.
Of course.
Of course that’s what he thought.
Which means that for nearly two decades, every time I casually flagged a future task, he heard: Drop everything you’re doing and attend to this urgent demand I am placing on you without warning or consent.
No wonder he was annoyed.
No wonder I thought he was overreacting.
We were both having completely logical reactions to two entirely different conversations.
The Radical Discovery That Words Are Not Universal
We like to believe that communication problems are about tone, or clarity, or maybe someone just “not listening.”
But sometimes the issue is much dumber than that.
Sometimes the problem is that you are using the same word to mean two different things and have never once checked.
In my case, “need” meant:
important
not urgent
should happen soon-ish
please hold this gently in your awareness
In his case, “need” meant:
urgent
immediate
why are you interrupting me
I guess everything I’m doing is now irrelevant
Same word. Completely different emotional payload.
And because neither of us had the audacity to question our own definitions, we just… kept going. For years.
So We Did Something Wild: We Got Specific
Once we realized we had accidentally been living in parallel semantic universes, we tried something radical.
We stopped being vague.
Instead of:
“We need to do this,”
we started saying:
“I’m flagging this for later—within the next month.”
“This is on our radar, no deadline.”
“Can you do this within the next day?”
“Is now a good time, or should we schedule it?”
It turns out, when you explicitly communicate time, urgency, and expectation, people stop reacting like you’ve just issued an emergency directive out of nowhere.
Who knew.
“Never Assume a Shared Understanding” (Yes, Even About Obvious Things)
This whole experience is a perfect example of something I say to clients all the time: never assume a shared understanding.
Because we do this constantly.
We assume:
“soon” means the same thing to everyone
“support” looks the same in every relationship
“friendship” has a universal definition
“we need to” is self-explanatory
And where do these definitions come from? A deeply scientific mix of:
whatever our families modeled
what movies told us was normal
what we’ve observed in other people
and vibes
We rarely sit down and say, hey, what do you actually think this means?
Instead, we compare behaviors, reverse-engineer intent, and then get annoyed when the other person fails to follow rules we never explicitly agreed on.
A flawless system.
When It’s Not That They’re Not Getting It
There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from repeating yourself and feeling like the other person just isn’t getting it.
You say it again. Maybe clearer. Maybe with more emphasis. Maybe with a little edge now.
And they still respond wrong.
At some point it starts to feel personal. Like they’re ignoring you. Or being difficult. Or just not trying.
But sometimes—unfortunately—it’s not that.
Sometimes they are getting it.
They’re just getting something different.
Especially in Autistic and mixed-neurotype relationships, where differences in context, interpretation, and language processing are not bugs—they’re features. But this shows up everywhere. Workplaces. Friendships. Families.
If you’re both working from different definitions, no amount of repeating yourself fixes the problem.
You’re just getting louder in two separate conversations.
Seventeen Years Well Spent
There’s something deeply humbling about realizing it took seventeen years to ask one clarifying question.
Seventeen years of:
mild confusion
unnecessary tension
both of us feeling slightly wronged
and neither of us being actually wrong
All because we assumed the word “need” came with a built-in, shared definition.
It doesn’t.
None of them do.
If You Want to Save Yourself a Decade or Two
If there’s a recurring friction point in a relationship—something that keeps coming up, keeps missing, keeps feeling like it should be simple—try this:
Ask what the words mean.
Not rhetorically. Not sarcastically.
Literally:
“When I say this, what do you hear?”
“What timeline are you imagining?”
“What does that word mean to you?”
It’s not glamorous. It’s not poetic. It will not be featured in any romantic montage.
But it might save you seventeen years of arguing about gutters.
And honestly, that feels like a win.
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