Do you think of me?

Thoughts by their very nature are private, in that they exist inside our heads, and we only share them with those we choose to share them with.  There are often people in our lives who can become so attuned to our thought processes that they can pretty much guess what we are thinking, all it takes is a look.  When there is no contact, no communication, even no presence at all, separated physically, you can think of someone all day from the second you wake until the moment you fall asleep and they would have no idea unless you tell them.

Privacy of thought is essential, as I've said before in the typical question of what superpower you would like to have, I think telepathy would probably be one of the worst.  Ironically the one place you might think it would help - your romantic life - it might actually cause the most damage.  Ask yourself very carefully if you would really want to know everything someone else is thinking, then ask if you would be happy with someone else, anyone else knowing everything that goes through your mind.  The thing about thoughts is that although we like to think they are an indicator of how a person would act, this is rarely true.  When you take politics as an example, what people think often has no bearing on how they would actually vote if you try and use logic and reasoning, people rarely vote for the party that most accurately represents their policy positions, sites like iSideWith prove this with extensive research, people don't read manifestos and don't take political pledges seriously.  Ultimately who a person votes for comes down to two things, emotional connection, and who they think can win.  There are outliers who do not conform, as there always will be.

What the political example shows however is that our actions are often driven more by reactions, impulses, instincts, and our assumptions more than they are based on logic and reason.  In other words if you could see inside someone's head you would likely see them telling themselves not to do x or to remember to do y and you would also see they don't actually have any great attachment or devotion to those actions, they just behave in that way because it is what is expected, or it is the way they always have.  Ask yourself how many people you think go to work with happy thoughts and excitement for their job versus how many if you saw inside their minds would be thinking about how much they hate it and the practicality of what they have to do next and when it needs to be done by.

This isn't a question of whether someone is disingenuous, that doesn't really come into play when talking about thoughts and actions, instead that comes into play with beliefs and intentions.  Disingenuous behaviour is the expression of belief and action motivated by belief that the person does not actually believe, in other words insincerity.  Disingenuous behaviour is linked to communication and interaction whereas thoughts alone apply to us and what we tell ourselves.

The balance is to be found between being an open book with no cover whatsoever as in the hypothetical telepathic scenario, and the other extreme of being a closed book with a lock without a key holding shut.  Communication is the key as they often say and in this case quite literally, the key to opening that lock.  What you choose to share can be as little or as much as you want as long as you make the commitment to at least share something.  If you want a relationship or a friendship to work, then you need to recognise that your thoughts are private and the person you want to build a relationship with can not read those thoughts.  You need to share the things you want to share, and you need to understand that it is unreasonable to want them to be able to know what you are thinking without having to tell them.  That level of connection is not dependent on intimacy, it depends on commonality and likeness.  The more you are alike another person the easier it is to know what they may be thinking because whatever you are thinking is probably the answer.  Most relationships are not narcissistic, people do not date themselves - again there will always be outliers you can think of who would fit that description quite aptly.

It's easy to be upset when someone doesn't say or do something you were expecting them to do, if you had attached a lot of significance to that action in your mind, the more you built it up the bigger the disappointment would likely be.  In situations like this the best approach is to stop and ask yourself what indication you gave of what you were thinking, then decide if it is fair to react so strongly.