Are offered to us with an instruction manual.

A guide to how the unfamiliar machine works.

What we can except from it!

How to get the best out of it!

And how to interpret its signals.

The assumption being,

that it would be so much easier and less enraging

to deal with this machine,

when we have taken some time systematically and patiently

to learn, how it operates.

And yet one area, when we tend not to have manuals to read

is when it comes to other people and their functioning.

This causes us immense troubles.

We going to relationship without any real sense

of where the others peculiarities will lie

and vice versa.

We are wittingly proceed

as if operating another person might be an intuitive skill

will just pick up along the way.

It can take a painful decade or more

to work out the very basics.

Mostly, human machines work in extremely odd ways.

And yet tend not to explain, the origins of their madness.

For example: They don't calmly lay out

that certain incidents in childhood

have given them a disposition to shout at airport,

to be suspicious of authority

or to be shifty in owning up to debts.

We must work backwards, from outward behavior,

to possible causes,

without any help, from the machines themselves.

Sometimes, the signals are just completely confusing.

"Fuck off, I really don't want to see you."

Turns out to mean:

I am so worried you don't want me

and I am getting in early with my revenge.

Please tidy away your clothes

and put away the dishes.

Might mean:

I am trying to control you procedurally

because I fell so out of touch with you emotionally.

We would save so much time

if we knew how to give one another manuals, early on.

If we could explain:

when I am hurt I go cold

or I am especially prone to be subservient,

but then, resentful

or I get brutal when I am at most vulnerable.

or I feel a need to talk about other possible lovers,

because I feel so unattractive to you deep down.

Instead, the weaknesses of machines

are usually discovered in a heat of conflicts.

In context where they would have wounded the other person.

And therefore

will be denied to the good will that might have ensured that could be forgiven.

Many of the difficult patterns of behavior of human machines

have very sympathetic points of origin.

But, once they have caused the partner humiliation

they are unlikely ever to be looked upon charitably.

We don't need people to be perfect,

We only need them to be able to see their faults,

to teach us about them, when we are unthreatened

and to apologize for the difficulties they causes in good time.

In other words, the greatest, most loving and luxurious gift

any partner could ever give another

is an instruction manual.

To their own rather tortured, odd

but ultimately, always really rather lovable soul.