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"ちゃんと話した結果…お互いに、思い込みだとわかったっつうか…"

The English translation was "We talked it over, and we realised we were both just confused." But I cannot understand "思い込み" here. The speaker and a woman were about to become lovers (付き合う). But after some happenings and talking, he discovered that actually some other boy was more important to her life than he (speaker), and he (speaker) did not really love her that deeply but was attracted to her because she was very kind and gentle to him.

Judging by the context, I guess that the word would mean something like 勘違い, 誤解, "wrong perception", "misconception" or something like that, but if I look up dictionaries, the meanings were "deeply believe" or "firmly decide".

PS: If you need more context, see the transcript at http://anicobin.ldblog.jp/archives/56894558.html . You can use Ctrl+F to find the position where that sentence was said.

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Simply, 思い込む has several meanings:

  1. [common] to firmly (mis)believe; to to make a (wrong) assumption

    彼は自分がテストに必ず合格すると思い込んでいる。

  2. [uncommon] (≒決心する) to resolve; to make up one's mind

    彼は一度思い込んだら信念を曲げない。

  3. [rare/obsolete] (≒思い詰める) to think hard; to worry deeply; to be obsessed

    彼は思い込んだ様子で私に話しかけてきた。

大辞林 says 思い込み can mean "firm resolution", but at least in modern Japanese, 思い込み almost never means that. Today 思い込み is almost always the nominalized version of 1., i.e., "(wrong) assumption". 思い込みの強い人 is a negative phrase that refers to someone who easily jumps to a wrong conclusion rather than someone who is determined. While 勘違い/誤解 tends to refer to casual ones that can be corrected easily, an 思い込み is often hard to amend by words.

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  • Well, so the meaning has recently changed. I thought "思いこむ" was something like 決心する. It is not uncommon in other languages that dictionaries do not sometimes keep up with the fast change of meanings; I had encountered such cased for English, too.
    – Damn Vegetables
    Jun 24, 2020 at 17:20
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    @DamnVegetables I checked 青空文庫 and confirmed that 思い込む in the sense of 勘違いする was already very common 100 years ago, so this meaning is not particularly new. But large dictionaries sometimes list an obsolete original meaning first and a common derivative meaning last.
    – naruto
    Jun 24, 2020 at 20:01
  • Oddly, the first dictionary link @DamnVegetables listed, did not supply more than one meaning, and the one meaning it supplied was the old one. However, if you look up 思い込む rather than 思い込み, you get somewhat better results (though I kind of feel it still expresses it somewhat tersely/somewhat poorly).
    – Micah Cowan
    Jun 25, 2020 at 2:00

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