I'm beyond frustrated with all the typical relationship advice in situations where a man feels slighted because his partner didn't explicitly say something completely obvious, as if talking to a 5-year-old, and she then dared to get displeased with his behaviour. People have this knee-jerk reaction to shout "communication!! he can't read your mind!!!" at any woman who expects her partner to figure out anything about her preferences on his own, based on nonverbal interactions and commonsense reasoning.

As an example, imagine a couple has been dating for a few months. On their first date, they talk about work and she tells a funny story about how a coworker gifted her a mushroom-themed cookbook and she just gifted it forward. She never orders dishes with mushrooms, and on a couple of dates she asks the waiter if they have any vegetarian dishes without mushrooms. They make smalltalk about food, and she tells him she can't stand ingredients that feel slimy or mushy.

One day she's recovering from a cold and craves pizza. He offers to order her one and asks her which toppings she would like, and she says she's too tired to think about it and he can just choose whatever... so he orders her a mushroom pizza. Sure, she technically said he could order whatever. Sure, she never explicitly said she doesn't like mushrooms. But it's really not an unreasonable expectation that the guy would figure this out.

This applies to countless other situations too in so many relationships, from household chores to boundaries with female friends to gifts and activities. Going through every preference in detail is inefficient and tedious when he could just go through a little bit of effort to improve his understanding of her. Hell, if you're extremely systematically minded and can't rely on your social intuition, get a notebook where you write down things you know she loves or hates and extrapolate from there.

Further, why would a woman expect her partner to read her mind? Is it because she's an irrational baby who doesn't understand how words work and that telepathy doesn't exist? Or is it maybe because she expects him to reciprocate the "mind-reading" which she is totally capable of and constantly does to her partner in order to anticipate his needs, which she effortlessly does with her female friends without the need to explicitly go over every preference, which her mom and sisters and hopefully father have generally been very capable of giving her? It's not a magical psychic ability, it's basic empathy and attentiveness.

If a man has been dating a woman for a while, and has functional social perception skills, he should be able to figure out her preferences in most day-to-day situations. When this fails, it's a sign that he's not emotionally attuned to her, or as close and invested as she thought he was. The crucial point here is that even if she communicated and uSeD hEr WorDs in a situation, the underlying problem would not be solved. It's not about the mushrooms, she's not disappointed because she has to pick mushrooms off her pizza, she's disappointed because the person supposedly closest to her with whom she'll share her life and build a family with has no idea how to interpret their daily interactions to form a coherent model of her as a person and her preferences. Don't ever settle for a low-empathy man.