Interpretive Fidelity

A personal essay on interpretive responsibility and shared reality

Author: Jordan Vallejo

Opening

Shared reality is one of the least defended requirements of human life. People can share a home, a history, and genuine affection, and still stop sharing what is happening. The failure is rarely dramatic. It arrives through small interpretive moves that compound over time, until one person realizes that the other has already decided what their meaning was.

Love is one of the most used words in that space. People say it to mean devotion, desire, loyalty, intimacy, forgiveness, obligation, safety, and fate. They say it when they are being kind, and they say it when they are being cruel. Sometimes the word is a promise. Sometimes it is an excuse. Sometimes it is the only language someone has for what they feel, even when what they feel is confused.

That confusion is not a cultural failure, it is a structural one. Love is usually treated as a feeling first, and a moral label second. The problem is that feelings are not stable, and moral labels do not tell us what is actually happening between two people. They do not tell us why someone can feel love and still misunderstand. They do not tell us why affection can coexist with dismissal. They do not tell us why the deepest pain in a relationship often has less to do with what happened than with what the other person decided it meant.

This essay approaches love as a stance toward meaning. In every relationship, meaning is constantly being decided. What did you intend? What did I hear? What matters here? What should count as real? When something goes wrong, the fight is rarely only about behavior. It becomes a fight about interpretation. One person tries to name what is happening. The other person tries to contain what that naming would require. Once the interpretive exchange becomes unreliable, everything else becomes less dependable. Trust, safety, memory, even tenderness. People can stay in the same room and stop sharing reality.

Underneath most heartbreak is a common experience: being misread, and then having that misreading treated as final.

This essay is not a scientific paper, and it does not assume any background in the General Theory of Interpretation. It is an essay that states a definition and its implications in ordinary language.

Love, as meant here, is the opposite of interpretive override. Interpretive override is what happens when a person’s meaning is forced into a shape that makes it easier to dismiss, control, or resolve. Sometimes it looks like contempt, but more often it looks like certainty. It can happen loudly, through accusation. It can happen quietly, through refusal. It often appears in the moment someone feels threatened and needs the situation to close. In that moment, the other person becomes a problem to solve rather than a reality to understand.

Love is the refusal to do that. Love is the sustained commitment to keep the channel clear, especially when it would be easier to make the other person wrong. It is the willingness to let meaning arrive without demanding it be performed perfectly first. It is the choice to stay with ambiguity long enough for shared reality to be possible again.

If that definition feels unfamiliar, that is part of the point. We have inherited many stories about love. Some of them are beautiful, and some of them are corrosive. This essay is not an argument against longing or devotion, it is an attempt to separate intensity from fidelity, and to name what makes someone feel safe to exist in your presence.

Because any definition of love that cannot be applied inward is incomplete, the essay turns to a necessary question. What does it mean to love yourself, not as self-admiration, but as interpretive honesty? What does it mean to stop committing interpretive override against your own mind?

1.

Most people learn the word love through experiences, not definitions. They learn it through what is given and what is withheld, what is rewarded and what is punished, what is named as care and what is dismissed as weakness. So it makes sense that love becomes a container word, a word people use when they cannot fully describe what is happening.

In everyday life, love often means some blend of intensity, preference, commitment, protection, and approval. None of these are wrong. The problem is that none of them are sufficient. Intensity can be real and still be unstable. Preference can coexist with control. Commitment can be made for fear, convenience, reputation, or guilt. Protection can become possession. Approval can turn into conditional acceptance. When love is defined primarily by feeling, love becomes something you have or do not have, something that grows or fades. When love is defined primarily by commitment, love becomes something you do or do not do, a set of duties that can be performed without genuine recognition. When love is defined primarily by closeness, love becomes a kind of merging, a demand that boundaries dissolve.

In all of these frames, a crucial question stays unasked: what does love do to interpretation when meaning becomes contested?

Conflict is where relationships show their structure. When a relationship is easy, many definitions of love appear to work. People laugh, share, agree, relax, and feel connected. But the test of love is not a good day. The test is misunderstanding, fatigue, shame, and the moments where both people believe they are describing reality while hearing accusation.

Most people do not leave relationships because there was never affection. They leave because reality became unshareable.

2.

To interpret is to decide what something means.

In practice, interpretation is what happens when you take a signal, a behavior, a sentence, a silence, a look, a pattern, or a memory, and you answer questions like these. What is happening? Why is it happening? What does it mean about me? What does it mean about you? What should happen next?

Interpretation is unavoidable. Even refusing to interpret is an interpretation. When someone says “I’m fine,” interpretation decides whether that is closure, avoidance, exhaustion, a request for space, or a request for care. When someone forgets something important, interpretation decides whether that is human error, disrespect, distraction, or a deeper pattern. When someone raises their voice, interpretation decides whether that is anger, fear, urgency, dominance, or panic.

Many relationship conflicts are described as communication problems, but often the deeper problem is not communication. It is that communication occurs inside an interpretive environment that has stopped being dependable. When interpretation is stable, people can disagree and still remain connected. Misunderstandings can be repaired. Intent can be clarified. Pain can be named and received. The relationship can carry ambiguity without turning it into a verdict.

When interpretation becomes unstable, the same events produce escalating harm. A single sentence becomes a trial. A request becomes a demand. A boundary becomes rejection. A mistake becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes identity. And once identity is assigned, the channel closes. You can feel this in real time when it happens. The other person stops trying to understand and starts trying to win, contain, deny, perform, or escape. In that moment, the relationship is no longer a shared reality. It becomes parallel realities, competing stories.

That is why love cannot be defined only as affection. Affection does not guarantee interpretive stability.

3.

The term interpretive override is not meant as a moral accusation. It describes what happens when meaning is forced.

Interpretive override is the act of altering someone’s meaning so that it becomes easier for you to tolerate, dismiss, control, or resolve. Sometimes it is overt. “That’s not what happened.” “You’re imagining things.” “You’re being irrational.” “You always do this.” “You’re trying to start a fight.” Sometimes it is subtle. The subject is changed instead of answered. Tone is addressed instead of content. Pain is treated as a debate. Perfect wording is demanded before listening. Immediate closure is treated as the highest good.

Interpretive override is often committed by people who believe they are being reasonable. It is often committed to relieve discomfort. The discomfort might be guilt, shame, fear, helplessness, or vulnerability. It might be the fear of being wrong. It might be the fear that accepting the other person’s meaning will require action, accountability, or change. So the mind searches for an exit. The exit often looks like certainty. Certainty closes the channel. Once certainty is achieved, the other person is no longer a reality to encounter. They become a story you already understand.

This is why interpretive override can be committed while someone still feels affection. Someone can feel love and still refuse meaning. Someone can be devoted and still deny reality. Someone can be loyal and still demand that pain be translated into acceptable language before it counts. The harm is not only that a person is misread, but that the misreading is treated as final.

When someone’s meaning is routinely forced into shapes that make it easier to dismiss, the person begins to learn that their reality is too expensive. They begin to translate themselves preemptively. They begin to edit their own signals. They begin to perform legibility.

4.

If interpretive override is the forcing of meaning, then love is the refusal to force. Love, as meant here, is a sustained commitment to preserve meaning.

This definition does not rely on romance. It does not require constant warmth, it does not require perfect calm, and it does not even require agreement. It requires something more fundamental and more exacting.

Love is the refusal to impose meaning in order to achieve resolution. Love is the willingness to keep the channel open long enough for shared reality to be restored. In practice, love looks like asking what someone means before declaring what they are. It looks like tolerating ambiguity without punishing it. It looks like letting pain be real even when you do not fully understand it. It looks like staying present when defensiveness tries to take control. It looks like caring more about fidelity than about winning.

Love is not the absence of conflict, it is what makes conflict survivable. Love is not always gentle. It can be firm, it can say no, it can enforce boundaries. But love does not collapse the other person into a caricature to justify those boundaries. Love maintains a distinction between “I am not willing to do that” and “You are wrong for wanting that.” Love maintains a distinction between “That hurt me” and “You are a bad person.” Love can be clear without being reductive.

This definition also clarifies something people sense but cannot always articulate. Being understood often feels more loving than being adored. Understanding is the restoration of shared reality. Shared reality is what makes trust possible.

5.

There is a quiet tragedy built into many human systems. When someone is hurt, they often must translate their pain into a form that the other person will accept before it is treated as real. This is not only a problem in intimate relationships. It appears in medicine, in workplaces, in families, in institutions. But it becomes most intimate and most painful inside love.

Pain is private. It is experienced inside a person. It cannot be fully transferred. So shared reality depends on translation. The person in pain must produce signals that represent something the other person cannot directly verify. The other person must decide whether to treat those signals as credible.

When the channel is loving, the person in pain is not required to prove themselves before they are received. The listener does not demand perfect phrasing, perfect composure, perfect timing, or perfect evidence. They might ask questions. They might seek clarity. But their stance is recognition, not suspicion.

When the channel is not loving, the person in pain is forced into performance. They must be clear enough, calm enough, reasonable enough, persuasive enough. If they cry, they are unstable. If they raise their voice, they are aggressive. If they stay quiet, they are passive. If they bring it up now, it is inconvenient. If they bring it up later, it is a grudge. The goalposts move. The person learns that their reality is negotiable.

This is why one of the most relieving experiences in life is being with someone who does not require gratitude as proof that care occurred. Gratitude can become another performance. A loving channel does not demand repeated reassurance. It does not ask the hurt person to comfort the listener for being kind. It does not require continuous praise to keep care stable. A loving channel communicates, in effect, “You do not have to earn recognition. You do not have to perform pain correctly. You can be seen without being evaluated.”

6.

Most people understand self-love as self-esteem, confidence, or self-admiration. Those things can accompany it, but they can also mislead. A person can admire themselves and still override their own meaning. A person can appear confident and still treat their own experience as suspect.

If self-love is the inward version of love, then self-love is the refusal to commit interpretive override against yourself.

Inward override often sounds like this: if I cannot explain it perfectly, it is not real. If I cannot justify it, I should ignore it. If I feel this, something is wrong with me. If I rest, I am failing. If I need care, I am too much. These moves are usually attempts at safety. They avoid conflict. They preserve function. They reduce the risk of rejection by translating experience into whatever seems acceptable.

The cost is that you stop sharing reality with yourself. You become a manager of your experience rather than a witness to it.

Self-love is different. Self-love treats experience as real before it is fully explainable. It refuses to use productivity as proof of worth. It listens inward before it optimizes. It allows feeling and need to register without being reshaped into something more acceptable. Self-love is not indulgence. It is the inward form of the same discipline: letting your mind be real even when it is inconvenient, letting pain be real even when it is messy, letting joy be real even when it feels undeserved.

This is why self-love can feel like relief. Relief is what happens when the channel clears. You stop arguing with your own reality. You stop translating yourself for yourself. You stop demanding that your mind justify its existence. You allow your mind to be seen.

Closing

A definition matters only if it changes conduct. If love is the opposite of interpretive override, it does not require grand gestures or dramatic proof. It appears in ordinary moments as a disciplined refusal to treat a single interpretation as final.

Love asks what someone means before deciding who they are. It does not punish difficulty, delay, or imperfect translation. It receives pain without demanding composure, precision, or gratitude as entry conditions. It can draw limits and say no, but it does not turn refusal into rejection or reduce the other person into the problem in order to justify the boundary. Love does not promise harmony. It refuses reinterpretation as a substitute for responsibility.

The same standard applies inward. Self-love is not affirmation or indulgence, it is the refusal to override one’s own experience for the sake of acceptability, productivity, or composure. It listens before it optimizes.

Where interpretive override ends, recognition becomes possible. Meaning no longer has to be imposed, managed, or reshaped in order to be received.

That is interpretive fidelity.

Suggested citation

Vallejo, J. (2026). Interpretive Fidelity: A personal essay on interpretive responsibility and shared reality. Transformation Management Institute.