In our worst moments in couples, we tend to assume that our problems are unfixable, that we simply don't get on, that we're the wrong sort of people to be together.
What we tend not to do is imagine that we have a problem of dictionaries, that our fundamental problem is that our partner and ourselves are, beneath the surface, following dictionary definitions that don't align.
We're squabbling because we don't understand what the same things mean for each one of us, because we're using the same words and terms without realizing that each of us has an entirely different understanding of their natures.
We imagine, as we try to live with someone else, that there isn't a gap in the way that we both define concepts like, for example, delays in answering a message or leaving the bathroom messy or spending time with friends.
It simply doesn't occur to us who've been wielding certain phrases and concepts one way since early adolescence that we might have encountered someone who sees them very differently.
It appears self-evident to us that a messy bathroom means a bathroom whose owner has shown us no respect, who's vicious, unkind, uncaring, and out to harm us.
It's totally natural, as natural as our understanding of the word chair or glass, that spending time with friends means a chance to rejuvenate, to take the pressure off a couple and achieve some necessary distance before returning to coziness once more.
What we're forgetting in all this is the noble and arcane discipline of etymology, that is, the history and genealogy of language.
It's the people we call etymologists who will carefully trace where a given word comes from.
They will tell us, for example, that window comes from the Old Norse word vindauga, meaning wind eye, or that clue comes from the Greek klothos, meaning ball of thread after that thread that Ariadne gave Theseus to escape the labyrinth.
