Talking about not talking

So I asked Wife this morning, as we sat in bed waking up, if she thought things would ever be better between us. She said she hopes so or it will be a pretty miserable rest of our lives, which confirms that she is still telling me she intends to stay with me.

There followed a long silence, which I finally remarked on. She said well of course there was silence, because we had nothing to say to each other (or at least nothing real, nothing substantive) other than recriminations about the past.

I answered, no there are lots of things we might say. The past doesn't even matter, after all, except as it affects the present and the future. We could talk about what we want out of the present ... or what we hope for the future. I speculated that the reason we don't discuss those things is that we are afraid of fighting about them.

We batted this around for a bit and finally settled on a slightly subtler version. Each of us is afraid of discussing intensely personal feelings or beliefs with the other. But our fears are slightly different. Wife is afraid that I will inflict pain on her, as punishment or for some other reason. I am afraid that she will mock and scorn me, and that she will use what she has learned to betray me to (with) one of her other lovers. There are similarities, but they are not quite the same.

Then Wife said something that I found truly interesting. She said that the reason I can hurt her so badly is that we are so close, and that I know her better than anyone else alive does.

Although she didn't expand on the idea a lot, I can extrapolate from what she said. I think this means that if she should ever leave me, it won't be that we have "drifted apart" or that I have no idea what matters to her. I think this means that if she should ever leave me, it will be more like a break for freedom. And freedom is a very, very important thing for Wife -- so important that I think sometimes she does things she even knows are damn-fool ideas, just to make sure she really can.

We talked for a while longer, but this was the most interesting thing I learned.