Possibly best relationship commentary i've read in a while.
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9a22g/men_of_reddit_this_went_well_for_the_women_but_i/c0byunr

Question:

What's the most crushing thing women unknowingly do to you guys???

Answer:

Lying to me.

When something is clearly bothering them and I ask "What's wrong?" and get the response "Nothing", well...

Explanation:

I want to explain this in a way that makes sense in a very roundabout fashion so you understand why the answer that a woman ends up with is "Nothing" when you ask that particular question.

Think of a woman as a robot who has been programmed by society but somewhere underneath it all, possesses a genuine intelligence. (I can make this metaphor because it's really true to some extent of guys AND girls, metaphorically. I'm not putting down my gender or anything.)

The woman has feelings. Sometimes she gets upset. Her sensory intake is so vast that frequently her emotions can jolt into high gear remarkably faster than her brain can get the sensory message and inform her conscious mind of why she's upset. Once she begins to experience a feeling, her sensory input multiplies her feelings before she's even consciously aware of them, because they're working so fast.

When she does become consciously aware of them, it's already telegraphed in the rest of her body. This generally the point at which a guy asks "What's wrong?" She has only just become aware of her feelings via her hardware.

At this point her software (social expectations) kick in. This is why some women can immediately say what's wrong where many others will say "Nothing." etc. Some women have great software.

If they have not-so-great software, their intelligence attempts to interpret their sensory information. If they can't yet interpret it, the default answer is "Nothing" as nothing has yet been established as "wrong."

In social situations/in front of other people, the software classifies what's wrong as "nothing" temporarily, as the software frequently has a caveat that it never admits to having a problem in public, because if in public, nothing is wrong. Wrong is defined as a state of being that occurs only in private.

The most insidious version of this - that happens before a woman can even think about it - is her software has been programmed to not recognize the problem. So in a sense, it is erring without knowing its erring. When a woman encounters a situation in which she feels upset and knows why, but has been programmed to identify the reason as not an appropriate cause of being upset (and in some cases if she knows YOU don't think it's a problem that can/should cause her to be upset), then technically nothing is wrong. She is feeling upset, but her software refuses to allow her to identify the cause, because its already identified as a non-cause.

The circular logic (at the speed of light) goes like this: What is wrong? (blank) is wrong. (blank) cannot be wrong. Nothing must be wrong.

And then before she's even had the chance to circumvent this, "Nothing" comes out of her mouth.

Of course, later, you have to deal with her intelligence that wanders around her psyche fixing things and saying, well, SOMETHING must be causing this error, let's try redefining this as a potential problem source and experimentally fix it. This is why four hours later, you'll have to have a conversation about what's wrong, even though she told you nothing was wrong.

I think it would help if you considered the "Nothing" as "EMOTIONS DO NOT COMPUTE! ERROR! ERROR!" Because I'm pretty sure that's mostly what it means.