Listen to the careful language here. This is Baya Voce [1] on Jonathan Haidt’s substack, After Babel, March 10, 2026

Here is what she says. One of the partners is in bed, their body “angled in that small wordless way that signals come here.” Then the other partner comes to bed and there is “a last email check.” Then finally, as Voce puts it, “Nothing dramatic happens….but the body registers it anyway.” [2]

How does the body register it? Here, it is “a faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs.” Then there is a mental grasp of the “event”—Voce calls it a “recalibration.”

I want to stop at “register.” I don’t want the body knowing something I don’t know or could not have known had I been better attuned. If Voce wants to say that the body knows something “I” do not know, I want to be sure that it is something I did not notice, not something I could not have noticed.

Everything the body “knows” came from me. I thought it or smelled it or felt it or heard it. I might not have noticed. If I didn’t notice, I don’t know about it. I pass it along nevertheless because I and my body have connections where information passes back and forth and I don’t even know about most of them.
So now the body “has” it. There is, as Voce says, “a faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs.” I can respond to these events, having no awareness of what I am responding to (the tightness) or the event that caused it (the lack of response to my signal) and this response can occur without my having any knowledge of what caused it.

In Voce’s imaginary scenario, I ask a logistical question—did you check in on the kids, did you remember to close the garage door, have you noticed a lack of reception in the bedroom? [3]—the goal of which is to say something but not to say what I am feeling. Voce says the “emotional request stays hidden inside something respectable.”

So there has been a “conversation” of sorts. I signaled a desire for emotional focus. My partner signaled a prior engagement. I adapted by asking a question, but not the question I wanted to ask. That is “the pattern.”

Voce calls the pattern “tiny departures that are too frequent to ignore.” These departures create “thousands of small injuries that accumulate over time, eroding trust and collapsing erotic potential and emotional safety.”

OK, That’s what Voce says. I would like to place this in context. First of all, since many of my friends read this, this blog is not about Bette and me. Second, I am not concerned about “the cellphone problem.” Bette and I both live in webs of relationships—the more so since we have separate sets of children—in which she and I are the principal subjects, but there are other people who deserve not to be ignored. I think we have devised a way to attend to each other, but to recognize that other claims on our attention need also to be acknowledged.

Those are two things this blog is not about. What it is about is the pattern of sending and receiving and responding to signals—none of which “I” might know about. Voce is writing about the “thousands of small injuries” that accumulate and that cause serious damage.

I have raised the question of what I know and what I can know and of what my body knows and can know and the relationship between the two. For me to continue thinking about things as I have done ever since grad school (in the 1970s) there are things I can not notice that are nevertheless mental events and these can be passed on to my body. Because I did not notice them, I do not know them. Because I passed them on, my body can “know them”—be affected by them—when I do not. And the effect can be more pronounced with recurrences of the event and I still will not know.

There are two kinds of solution for this problem. One is to make myself aware of them so I can talk about them. There are ways to do that. The other is to change my life so that I do not cause these small injuries and so that I notice them when I am injured in that way. Those are the two kinds. Both are possible but both are difficult.

What most people do, as I see it, is to live with them and “get over them.” Voce might say that you really never get over those toxic patterns, but maybe you do. Maybe they get folded into some general schema about the partner. Maybe I adjust my expectations. Maybe I change the silent requests into spoken requests. Maybe they get better at registering unspoken requests. There are lots of ways.
I am not, myself, a “relationship repairer,” which is what Voce called herself. I am just someone with a sustained and active interest in how we receive, fabricate, and store the data that matter most to us. It’s an old grad school habit.

[1]. Baya Voce says she is a “relationship repair expert.”

[2]. I am trying not to make the signaler “she” and the nonrespondant “he.” It requires vigilance and the prose suffers, but I think it is worth it.

[3]. There is a small parallel meaning there. We keep them separate by calling it “reception” in the technology sense and “receptivity” in the interpersonal sense, but here they overlap.