Look for
Roles
What kinds of participant does the relationship make each person: equal partner, supervisor, caregiver, customer, friend, debtor, host?
One way alignment happens
Roles, expectations, and permissions
How does a relationship make some actions expected, permitted, required, or inappropriate?
Relationships organize interaction partly by establishing roles and expectations: who may do what, who owes what, whose decisions carry weight, and how one person's action should be interpreted by another.
Try seeing it
The same action can change meaning when the relationship changes.
Giving advice can be helpful between friends, required from a supervisor, presumptuous from a stranger, or intrusive in a relationship where the other person expects autonomy.
The physical behavior is similar. What changes is the relational rule through which the behavior is interpreted.
Look for
Expectations
What does each party assume the other should normally do without being explicitly asked?
Look for
Permissions and obligations
Which actions require consent, consultation, repayment, explanation, or no special authorization at all?
A characteristic failure
Unspoken rules can diverge silently.
Relational expectations are often learned rather than explicitly negotiated. Each person can therefore treat their own interpretation as obvious.
Conflict then appears to be about the immediate act when the deeper disagreement concerns what kind of act it was.
A useful perturbation