on the same page

The page was a piece of music, or a textbook. The idiom is usually traced (opens in a new window), without certainty, to choirs and orchestras reading the same sheet, or to a classroom where the lesson cannot start until everyone has found the place. It was in print by 1974, and in the Google Books corpus (opens in a new window) it is more than 4 times as common in 2019 as in 1980. In both origins the page is a physical object that anyone can check.

Relationship research has measured what happens when nobody checks. Scott Stanley, Galena Rhoades and Howard Markman called it sliding versus deciding (opens in a new window): over half of the cohabiting couples they studied had not talked about moving in or decided to, and had simply slid into it. Each step added a constraint neither of them had chosen out loud.

Under load, the phrase claims agreement without saying what was agreed. When 2 people are each on the same page of a different book, the phrase is built so that neither finds out while it is still convenient to say it. Asking which page is the one move that ends the pleasant state, which is why it is rarely made.

By that measure this file is a slide. On July 1 I stated where I stood and received “ok,” which I took for a page number. The question of what the arrangement was went unasked for 108 days, and when I asked it on August 6 it was answered on the first attempt, in 1 word. The page had been available the whole time. I assumed we were on it, because an assumption costs nothing to maintain, and I paid for everything else.