The Importance of Communicating One’s Emotional Needs to Another Before Issues Arise

In “An Instruction Manual To Oneself“, the School of Life offers thoughtful insight into the fact that humans, unlike machines, don’t come with instructions, but instead rely upon one another to communicate their emotional needs, wants and desires ahead of any prickly issues that arise.

Most machines of any degree of complexity are offered to us with an instruction manual, a guide to how an unfamiliar technology works, what we can expect from it, how to get the best out of it and how to interpret its signals – the assumption being that it will be so much easier and less enraging to deal with the machine when we have taken some time systematically and patiently to learn how it operates. Yet one area where we tend not to have manuals to read is when it comes to other people and their functioning…We don’t need our lovers to be perfect. We need them to warn us of their quirks in good time. We need them to give us an instruction manual to themselves.