I spent twenty minutes yesterday explaining to my friend why her advice about my work situation missed the point entirely. I laid out the complexities she hadn’t considered, the context she didn’t understand, the nuances that made her simple solution impossible to implement. I was thorough, patient, slightly exasperated at having to spell out what seemed so obvious from my perspective.
Then she started telling me about her own struggles with her teenage daughter, and I found myself formulating responses before she finished her sentences, crafting solutions based on the first thirty seconds of her explanation, internally rolling my eyes at complications that seemed easily resolvable if she would just try what seemed obvious from my perspective.
The hypocrisy hit me like cold water: I had spent half an hour demanding understanding while offering none in return.
We are all experts at the complexity of our own lives while assuming everyone else’s problems have simple solutions. We crave to be seen in full dimension—with all our contradictions, constraints, and impossible circumstances—while seeing others in flat caricature, reducing their multifaceted struggles to problems we could solve if we were them.
This is the great asymmetry of human relationship: we experience our own lives from the inside, feeling every pressure and complication, but we experience everyone else’s life from the outside, seeing only results without understanding the forces that created them.
When someone gives us advice that doesn’t fit, we immediately catalog all the reasons they don’t understand: they don’t know our history, our limitations, our specific circumstances, the real complexity of what we’re dealing with. But when we give advice that isn’t taken, we assume the problem is their stubbornness, their inability to see the obvious solution, their resistance to change.
We want others to understand that our anger comes from hurt, but we see their anger as evidence of poor character. We want them to recognize that our mistakes come from difficult circumstances, but we attribute their mistakes to poor judgment. We want compassion for our failures and accountability for theirs.
The understanding we crave requires someone to see us as the hero of our own story—flawed but sympathetic, doing our best in impossible circumstances, worthy of patience and forgiveness. But we rarely extend this same generous interpretation to others. They remain supporting characters in our narrative, judged by their usefulness to our plot rather than understood as the protagonists of their own complex stories.
Maybe this is why real understanding feels so rare and precious when we find it—because it requires someone to temporarily abandon the center of their own story to fully inhabit the center of yours. It requires them to care less about being understood and more about understanding, to listen not for the place where they can insert their own wisdom but for the place where your experience makes perfect sense even if their experience would be different.
The hardest part isn’t learning to understand others—it’s learning to want to understand others as much as we want to be understood ourselves. It’s recognizing that everyone else’s story is as complicated, as justified, as worthy of patient attention as our own.
Tonight when someone shares their struggle with me, I want to try something radical: I want to listen as if their story were as important as mine, as if understanding them mattered as much as being understood by them. I want to offer them the same generous interpretation of their motives that I want them to offer mine.
Because maybe the understanding we’re so hungry for isn’t something we can demand or extract—maybe it’s something we can only receive by first learning to give it away.