"What's Wrong?"

There are times when I can sense that my wife is unhappy or bothered about something. At those times, I ask the obvious question, "what's wrong?" and she gives me this response; "nothing." This is an awful answer for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is this: I'm a geek, and I analyze everything. If my wife were to tell me what was wrong, I would take that little bit of information, and file it away in my mental model of "how my wife works." It would get corrolated against everything I could possible associate it with. Everything from the topics of conversation leading up to the "what's wrong", to the events of the day, to the time of day and where we were. Everything would get filed away into the massively-cross-linked database that is my nerd brain.

Now let's fast-forward again to the next time I'm about to ask "what's wrong?" This time, I'm mentally going back and checking against all the previous instances I've encountered like this one, looking for similarities and trends. This time, I don't have to even ask, "what's wrong?" because I am informed from my previous experiences and the corrections my wife made to my mental model the last time she explained herself. She would be letting me learn something about her that helps me be a better mate to her.

The thing is, when she answers with, "nothing" right now, I give up and I walk away, because she's shutting me down and closing me out. There's no way I can learn the motivations and impulses and feelings she's experiencing that are leading her to be upset, because she's providing no feedback at all for me to adjust my approach. This is like playing a videogame actually: you learn how high Mario can jump, how far he can jump, and under what circumstances you can safely navigate a level. The game gives you immediate feedback that lets you build a model for expected outcomes: given this set of variables, and this set of inputs you're applying to the game, you can expect such and such a result. You can begin to predict and influence the outcome. The more you play, the better you get at being able to navigate the game's environment because you're integrating the feedback (both positive and negative) back into how you handle the controls.

Now by no means do I at all assume that my wife (or any other woman) could be reduced down to something so simple, and by no means are the life events that lead up to a, "what's wrong," moment deterministic, but it would go a long way towards me being better able to read her, understand why she's upset and even work to help avoid such circumstances in the future if she would just be willing to explain what was in her head. It wouldn't have to make sense, or be logical or even be nice, but I just can't learn from a deadpan response of, "nothing" every time.

A videogame where the screen goes black and resets every time you make a single mistake isn't at all engaging. I mean, have you ever played Dragon's Lair? Awful game really. Not fun.