"You can never see inside someone else's relationship"

Sometimes I carry on imaginary conversations in my head. Maybe you do it too.

This evening, for example, over dinner, I was carrying on a conversation with my sons (an imaginary conversation in my head) about some of the more … outlandish … features of my marriage to Wife. (You knew it was outlandish, right? That wasn't a surprise? See for example this exchange with Jane, starting in the comments here.) So I imagined one of them asking, "Why did you put up with that?"

In my mind I stewed for a while, looking for a pithy-yet-profound answer but failing to find it. But then I fell back on the formula I put in the title of this post: "You can never see inside someone else's relationship,"

This is an insight I remember Wife coming to long ago, maybe in the first five years of our marriage, or close enough. The background is that from time to time she would sit around with one of her old friends, and they would complain about their respective relationships (or, in at least Wife's case, marriages). And what Wife found in those conversations was this:

• On the one hand, she would hear friends describe some behavior on the part of their partners that sounded to her like instant show-stoppers. She would tell her friends, "No joke, but if Hosea ever did that I would be out of his life forever so fast it would make his head spin." And her friends would invariably say, "OK, sure, I see your point, but in this case it's different."
• On the other hand, when she would complain about something I had done (or failed to do), the exact same conversation would play out with only the dramatis personae flipped.

She concluded, reasonably enough, that you can never know for sure where another couple have or will set the boundary lines—what they accept, and what they think goes just too far.

Of course there's a risk here. Sometimes the partner's bad behavior rises to the level of abuse. Sometimes it's not that every couple has their own incommunicable framework, but that one partner is a predator and the other has lost the will to resist. Trust me, these things happen. And I assume there is some grey area where it's not clear which of the two explanations is better.

But I think the basic insight is a good one.