There’s something truly gratifying about “cracking” your partner’s secret language, coming to understand their implicit cues and body language.  Especially when you’re pretty dense, like myself.

This isn’t even something I considered until it dawned on me one day that Lance was saying something but meaning something completely different.  It was the same question he’d ask me at least once a week:  ”So….what do you want for dinner?”

For months–if not years!–we went back and forth for a half an hour before finally deciding to just order a pizza.  And then there came the day, after experiencing this dozens of times, that I realized Lance only asks that question when he doesn’t want to cook, but is too unmotivated (or broke!) to go out to a restaurant.

“What do you want for dinner” was code (you guessed it!) for pizza.

Now, instead of wasting a half-hour on failing miserably to come to a compromise, I know right away that we’re just going to order pizza and I can spend the next 29 minutes watching old episodes of Louie on Netflix.

Other examples of Lance’s Code include:

• The “I’m not answering your e-mail so I don’t have to acknowledge whatever you’re proposing” trick (I’m pretty sure Lance swore, “Sonofabitch!” when he found out that I broke this code);
• The “We need to do X” play, which really means, “You need to do this because I don’t want to, and I’m trying to be diplomatic.” 

Of course, this isn’t to say that I’m without my own “code”–hell, I’m arguably the most passive-aggressive person you’ll ever know. We’re all about codes!–but I’ll leave that to Lance to detail in another post.