The Monday After • Aug 24, 2026
You Read People Wrong
Darren Carlson
You talk to a friend and walk away from the conversation convinced you heard exactly what they said and meant, only to find out you misunderstood what they were trying to tell you. Has that happened to anyone else?
William Ickes has spent a career measuring something most of us assume we're good at: reading the people closest to us. He calls it empathetic accuracy. Strangers, in a first conversation, get it right about 20 percent of the time. Close friends and family members: 35 percent. That's the ceiling. The people who love you best are still wrong about your inner life most of the time.
The conclusions of his research on married couples may seem even crazier. He found the longer couples are married, the worse they get at reading each other. That is challenging to hear when I think I am closer to my spouse now than I ever have been. Somewhere along the way, everyone locks in a version of their spouse, and then it no longer gets updated. The spouse may have been changed by children or a job or a deep wound. And you are still operating from a file that never gets updated.
It is very hard to understand what a person is truly thinking or feeling. I personally have a hard time with people who seem to know everyone’s motives and intents when I can’t even figure out my own. But what we can say for sure is that the person that is across from us in conversation is interesting, because they are a glorious image bearer.
So what do you do with a 20 to 35 percent success rate at reading people, in a world Jesus tells us not to judge with false confidence? You bear with people.
Paul uses this phrase in his letter to the Ephesians when he tells them to walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” Bearing with one another assumes friction. It assumes people are being misread and maybe even sinned against. You don’t bear with someone if the relationship is easy and natural.
Paul also writes that love “believes all things” and “hopes all things.” Love isn’t naive about sin. It just doesn’t assume the worst.
So what do you do when you read a situation or a person? Is your interpretation settled fact? What does it mean that there is a 65% chance you are wrong about how the person you know well who is across from you is feeling?
You don’t know what is going on in people nearly as well as you think. Will you bear with them?
When my friend was in college at the University of Minnesota, he lived on a floor with a Christian Resident Assistant (RA). My friend was an atheist. In September, the RA ran a contest to guess the first snow day of the year. My friend guessed a day in December and, to mock the Christian RA, wrote "Friend of God" on that date on the public calendar.
Later that fall, he started asking his RA questions about faith. One night he came back to the dorm drunk, and the RA saw him. He felt shame for the first time in his life and had no idea why. Why would he, an atheist, feel shame? He kept pressing the RA with questions, and eventually found himself in the shower, praying: "God, if you're real, I want you. I want to know you. I have no idea if you're real."
Immediately, he felt the presence of God fill the room. He was saved.
The next morning he woke up to snow on the ground. He checked the public calendar — it was the exact day he'd picked. And there were his own words staring back at him: "Friend of God."
Here's the addendum that'll make you laugh.
My friend attended Centennial High School. I have a friend who taught there while he was a student, so I asked if he'd ever had him in class. My friend put his head in his hands. "The year after I graduated," he said, "I forked and TP'd his house. He has no idea it was me. Please tell him that punk kid is a Christian now — and I'm sorry."
Here is something worth reading. The premise is that most of us are much worse at seeing people than we think. Being a NYT Bestseller, it tells you there is a hunger to know people.
Thanks for checking in.
Sign up here to receive Darren Carlson's The Monday After email. This weekly newsletter is designed to encourage your faith and share inspiring stories of what God is doing around the world. Each edition features a short devotional, a story that will give you a glimpse of His work in unexpected places, and a resource you might find helpful.
10.5.26When a Pastor Gets Everything, and Nothing Gets Done
Last week I sat in the wrong coffee shop for 20 minutes before realizing I was meeting someone else. I rushed to the right one, apologizing on the way in, and still ended up having a great hour of mutual encouragement with a man I admire. After the meeting, I looked […]
9.28.26The Pharisees Read the Same Bible
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus keeps returning to the same pattern: "You have heard that it was said," and then, "But I tell you." He is not correcting the Old Testament. Jesus is on the hillside correcting what the religious teachers had done with it. "Eye for eye, and […]
9.14.26When the Towers Fell
It took 99 days to extinguish the fires. Last week we marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. My parents' generation remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed. I vaguely remember the Challenger exploding on television. But for Generation X and many millennials, 9/11 is the event in American […]
9.7.26On Therapy Culture
A woman in her 20s at your church has an Instagram bio that reads, before her name, before a single photo: ADHD. Anxiety. CPTSD. Not what she loves or enjoys. Just a diagnosis to frame her life. The rising generation has received more therapy than any generation before it. The journalist […]
