[magicalhippo]

I have this issue with my SO where I'll sigh heavily and she'll interpret it as me disapproving of whatever she just did or did not do, inventing scenarios in case there's no immediately obvious cause.

Instead my head is somewhere else entirely, and I might have been annoyed at myself for forgetting to pick something up at the store or whatever.

We've gotten better at handling it, I try to remind myself to immediately tell her it wasn't her, and she asking me what it was if I forget. But there has been a lot of unnecessary bad times that originated from such episodes...

[runawaybottle]

I was watching a Dog Whisperer episode where this couple had a violent pitbull. It turned out the two people (mostly the girl) just wanted out of the relationship and deferred the conflict onto the dog as the conduit of the problem.

This is not uncommon for men or woman to do, and more commonly expressed as ‘you are looking for things to point out’.

You can run your own little test. Convert the sigh to something similar like shrugging. Consider it debugging with console.logs until you find out the source of the bug.