I don't think they know

My husband and I will be celebrating three years of marriage on May 26, 2010. Although there are days when I miss the isolation that I knew before I got married, when it was just my dog, Dexter, and me, I love being married. I love being his best friend, and I love knowing that he is mine.

I love being his wife.

Every once in a while, I think about what we were like before we were married. I remember all those long conversations that we used to share on the telephone when he was living in Calico Rock, Arkansas, and I was a small town girl trying to make it in the big city.

We used to could talk for hours on the telephone.

Sometimes, we would even chat via Yahoo Messenger, sharing entire conversations without audibly articulating a single word.

After we got married, I think, it became more difficult for us to communicate. When I think about that fact, I tend to come back to the idea that we spend so much physical time together, we tend to gravitate to our respective corners of the house in the evenings.

When we shared an office, that meant that we sat facing each other, the screens on our respective desktops back to back, with him doing his thing while I did mine. We were physically together, with few words.

I guess we thought that the fact that we were together was enough.

Now, we don’t share an office, so when I say that we gravitate to our respective corners of the house, I mean exactly that.

It’s not that we didn’t want to share an office anymore, or that we got sick of each other’s presence. I had to move out of the office when the Bitlet started getting more mobile. I needed to have space where she could crawl around, exploring her environment, and now that she is walking, she needs more space to test her legs.
Because we aren’t in the same room as much, the silence that is so often between us, and has always been there, is more pronounced to me.

It has become apparent that, although sharing an office might create this link between us, without that physical proximity, there is a sense of isolation at times.

For Stephen, a man of few words, I don’t think it is a “problem,” but for me, it emphasizes everything that I hated about living alone.

The silence can be deafening.

I don’t know who said that, but I think it’s true.

I try to pry myself from my corner more and more often, realizing that we don’t have those long conversations. We don’t chat online like we used to, and really, the idea that we would seems more than a little silly. Our house is not that big.

In seeking his company out more and more, telling myself that living together is not the same as sharing a life and building a bond as a family, I find it is often difficult to really communicate with him.

That’s not a complaint. I think it is difficult to truly communicate with people, to relate to others. That’s what separates our friends and families from the millions billions of other people with whom we coexist on this planet. The barrier between Stephen and me is not that absence of a special connection that makes one simply an acquaintance. It’s not even the fact that I am an extrovert and he is an introvert, as I once believed.

I think the struggle we face, at times, is directly related to the fact that he is a man and I am a woman. I know it’s not that he doesn’t care for my company, what I think, how I feel. He absolutely is present when I want to share the myriad synapses in my brain with him.

Getting him to share what is on his mind, however, is sometimes difficult.

This week, when I was watching Grey’s Anatomy, something clicked. Sarah Gilbert (who played Darlene on Roseanne) was a guest star. She played a terminally ill cancer patient who had decided to end her life through physician-assisted suicide. At one point, she and her husband were talking about the fact that she had decided to take the drugs that would end her life at the hospital, rather than doing it at home, so that her husband would not have to worry about . . . afterward. He was sent to their home to gather items familiar to their lives together – a comforter that, presumably, decorated their bed and wine—with wine glasses, not a cup, she informed him, a little impatiently.

She wanted to die in a place that seemed like home without actually leaving her husband to be in that place after she was gone.

After he left, she was talking to Christina (played by Sandra Oh), and she make the statement, out of the blue, “I don’t think they know.” Christina was (rightfully) confused, and she asked her to explain.

“I don’t think they know how they feel,” Sarah Gilbert’s character obliged. She elaborated that men often don’t know how they feel, what they are thinking, what is going on in their minds when we ask what they are thinking, because they don’t think about the significance of their thoughts.

It’s not that they don’t actually think. They just don’t try to parse the thoughts in their minds. As a result, when we ask, we get the easy answer, “nothing,” or we get an abrupt shift of a topic that is more comfortable. For her husband, it was a simple statement that he would get the things from their home.

I suddenly got it.

Of course Stephen, who reads my blog, might think that I didn’t get the point at all, but what she said made sense. Stephen, and I think it might be true for a lot of men, obviously go through their lives functioning, thinking about what needs to be done, what is going on at work, what plans might be made for the future, but they don’t keep a running catalog of those thoughts and the emotions the thoughts might evoke, so when we ask them to articulate their thoughts, it’s like we have asked them our “simple” question in Greek.

Which, I guess if fine, if you speak Greek.

And when we ask them, expecting a substantive response, it probably creates a very uncomfortable moment for a man who hadn’t really tried to put a label on the thoughts and emotions. Having been asked to do so at the drop of a dime and the whim of one who will, undoubtedly, require some in-depth explanation can’t be easy for him.

To be honest, it’s not comfortable for any of us, really, but most people don’t ask for the impromptu dissection of our thoughts and emotions. Men don’t, as a general rule.

When you think about it really, women actually have it easy, because we aren’t placed in that uncomfortable moment on a moment’s notice very often.

But how often do we do it to the men in our lives?

How often do we walk away, frustrated, when the answer is the easy “nothing?”

For me, so often, I have been left frustrated, thinking that he either didn’t want to tell me, or didn’t think I would understand or, worse yet, truly wasn’t thinking anything at all.

How is that fair, when I have all this thinking, thinking, thinking on the brain?

Maybe it really is just as simple as Sarah Gilbert’s character hypothesized. Maybe men just honestly don’t know, but it’s easier to simply say “nothing” than it is to either try to come up with something off the top of their heads, or to let the silence become uncomfortable as they try to replay the thoughts that were in their heads in the second and moments before the dreaded ambush was sprung.

“What are you thinking?”

Maybe Stephen honestly doesn’t know, and maybe if I will give him a little time, he will be able to tell me what is on his mind, once he has had an opportunity to identify the thoughts for what they are. Maybe I could show more patience, giving him more time, before throwing my hands up in disgust at the fact that I apparently married a mindless simpleton.

Kidding. I don’t think that.

Not really.

It’s just, maybe I don’t know . . . but I want to. If I wait, give him time, let him think a little more, maybe I will.
With a man like Stephen, and all the million thoughts I know he has, I think my life would be much richer for that little effort on my part.

He might not know in the instant that I ask, but maybe if I can just take a second to remember that thought, the next time he tells me that he is thinking “nothing,” I might actually get to know the answer in his time. Not mine.