Too often I've assumed others shared my point of view, only to later learn how wrong I was. Why does it matter? If communication is the heart of a good relationship, and our perception about how another is thinking or feeling is "off", and we don't know it (or choose to avoid knowing it), we're starting the slide into misunderstanding, away from intimacy.

            An almost comical (if not so poignant) example often comes to my mind. In 2000, my husband and I sold the home in which we’d lived for over 40 years, and where we raised our family. Len had been diagnosed with Parkinson's three years earlier, and although his symptoms were still mild, he was finding climbing stairs ever more arduous. Hence the decision to move.

            Our great good fortune was to find a sunny apartment rental with a river view, a parking garage and no stairs. Our house sold quickly, we simplified life by downsizing our possessions, and both of us felt lighthearted to be leaving so much responsibility behind.

             For me, raised in and around New York City, the return to apartment life was like putting on a pair of comfortable old shoes. For Len, although he had grown up roaming the open prairies of Illinois, for five years soon after we married, we had lived in one flat or another when he attended Columbia University. And he’d relished city life.

            So, we happily settled into our new seventh floor home, only ourselves to please in this latest phase of our lives, quite unencumbered but for our cat, Eleanor. Hers was the major adjustment, for she went from being an outdoor wanderer and hunter, to a life completely circumscribed by the apartment walls and our small balcony.

            When our first visitors inquired about how we enjoyed our new living quarters, I readily answered for both of us that it was all quite wonderful. Len just smiled. Then Eleanor padded into the room, and they asked how she was adjusting to being an indoor cat.

            "She loves it," I said.

            "She hates it," Len offered on the heels of my comment. "She feels trapped and confined."

            I was shocked. We had both projected onto our inscrutable cat, how each of us was actually feeling. Quite unconsciously, I’d attributed to my emotional state an objective reality we shared, when that was anything but the case. My comfort and delight with our new surroundings was in no way matched by Len's unspoken despair, in a world that continued to narrow as his physical limitations advanced.

            I should have asked, instead of assuming he experienced my positive response to our move. Ironically, openly assigning our feelings to our furry pet launched important conversations. I needed to face what he, until that moment, had hidden, and what I’d preferred not to know.

            Intimacy was renewed.