Misunderstandings

When people talk in set discourses and frames and then the listener reacts to it in the habitual way, you end up in a stalemate. that way also a honeymoon can go sadly wrong. Ian McEwan in On Chesil Beach: "And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. nothing much at all."

Definitely a must read.