Lessons from a dysfunctional relationship: communication

These are thoughts I've kept for years. It's time for them to begin to emerge. I can only guess at how they might be received by my various readers, but to two people at least I have things to say. To one: don't worry. What you see here is not a change in me, but a reawakening of parts of me that were asleep when we met. To the other: I love you; and I know that I am not telling the whole story. But this is the part of it that, right now, is crying out to be told.

Whoever talks the most loses. If I bare my soul to you freely and without prompting, and you reveal your thoughts rarely and only after much coaxing, then you are the winner.

First, you are the winner by simple economics. If a good is flowing liberally from me to you, and only scantily from you to me, it follows that I am being steadily impoverished.

Second, you are the winner because in both exchanges I am the one betraying need. I need to share with you, and I need you to share with me. You, apparently, need neither, since you neither solicit communication from me nor volunteer information on your own. So I am weak, because I need, and you are strong, because you do not-- and you have power over me, because you control whether my needs are met.

Third, you are the winner because you have the power of superior information. You know things about me, and you can-- and do-- use them against me, while you remain impervious. You understand me, and I do not understand you. You are a cipher, I am transparent. And this is exactly how you want it.

With regard to the first, I did in time learn to stem the flow of communication. I learned to talk, if I must talk, to a notebook, or to a tree, or to God. I learned-- and I thank you for this-- that I can be a whole person unseen, unshared. I can be real without being reflected in another's eyes.

Learning not to need your communication was another matter. It was complicated because I knew that your independence was an illusion. In truth, you needed to tell me things much more than I needed to hear them... but you could hardly bring yourself to share, let alone to admit that you needed to. And so, my love, I continued to need your words-- continued to draw them out with hours of painstaking questions, bracing against rebuffs. It looked, to one watching, as if I was letting you make a fool of me, subjecting me to this mortifying ritual of supplication for your confidence. But by that time I didn't much care about foolishness.

In the end, you found other ears, and I was freed, first to be silent, then to begin to rebuild a sane pattern of communication. We talk, now, like friends. And the real measure of grace is that much of the time I don't even remember what a gift that is. The lack of astonishment in our dialogue is the most startling and beautiful thing of all.

But these things I learned from you have gone deep. The good and the bad in them are wound so closely-- independence, circumspection; constraint, frigidity-- that I hardly know how I ought to shape myself, even if I could master the fear of being exposed like that again. It is such a mixed legacy that time of ours has given me; so many twisted lessons I have learned. It is time, at the very least, to bring them into the light. This is the first.