Aristocratic silence

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a letter to D, telling her as usual about the trivia of my day and complaining about some petty interaction with Wife, ... and suddenly as I typed I understood a huge dynamic that has been at work during the whole quarter century and more that we have been together. It blew me away. When I started one paragraph I had no idea about this, and by the time I finished I could see the thing whole and of a piece. All I can say is that sometimes in the process of explaining things I come to understand them better: that, in fact, is why I started writing this blog in the first place.

I think the easiest thing for me to do will simply be to quote my discussion from two consecutive letters, making minor adjustments for readability. I began like this: ...

My conversation with Wife this evening as we made dinner was as frustrating as usual, but not in a psychotic way … just in an "Ohmigod-how-can-you-be-so-pathetically-helpless" kind of way. (This means, of course, that if the conversation had gone on any longer I would have drunk steadily through it.) As I was grating some cheese for her (to garnish the tuna casserole – yes, tuna casserole – that she had made for dinner), she asked "Why didn’t you buy the XYZ from Costco that I had put on the shopping list?" Now in fact I had bought it, so I didn’t reply at once because I wasn’t sure quite how to. As I stayed silent she went on, "Did you even go to Costco? Were they all out? Or did you just figure that it was only for me so I should pay for it?" I found it was very difficult for me to make myself say the simple phrase, "But I did" … I don’t know why, but for years I have found that phenomenally hard. I sometimes think it is because this same conversation has played out so many times – so many times that I have done something for her which she simply has not seen, so that she then puzzles over / wonders why / accuses me of not having done it – that I scorn to enter the discussion at all. It is as if I feel that I will sully myself by stooping to set her straight, because it feels too much like whining, "I did too! Teacher, she’s being mean to me!" … or perhaps too much like fish-merchants railing at each other in stinking alleyways. It is as if I feel that, if she chooses to be so blind as not to see what I do for her, the only dignified response is to shrug and turn away with a kind of grand indifference or aristocratic disdain rather than engaging in some kind of vulgar, degrading, plebeian squabble over whether I did or didn’t do this or that trivial little thing to help her out. Of course, as I write this I see immediately that this is a self-defeating approach: what I want is for her to come to her senses and see what is in front of her, and then to have the good grace to be ashamed of herself for being so blind and self-centered, for not bothering to check before she lobs accusations right and left. And of course I realize intellectually – again, only now that I go to the trouble of writing this out – that she never will. She will just see that she asked me to do A, that (according to her own tunnel vision) I never did it, and that when she tried to follow up by asking me about it I (figuratively speaking) turned and shrugged and walked away. And how shall she read that? As proof of whatever her current vile-theory-of-the-day is about me. Of course, what else? In other words, this is not a strategy to get me what I want.

Then, a couple of nights later, I went on as follows:

I have been thinking lately that I should explain to Wife this business that I explained to you, about the "aristocratic silence" when she asks me why haven’t I done something that I really already did. The reason is that, on reflection, I have a pretty strong sense that this specific dynamic has been huge in our marriage. It probably grew out of my shyness and an unwillingness to join an argument if I didn’t have to; I think another root may even have been a high-minded disinclination to show her up as a fool for failing to see what was right in front of her face. But in any event the script works like this:

• She asks me, for instance, "Why didn’t you buy popsicles to soothe my sore throat?" when I had already bought them and put them in the freezer.




• I don’t reply, feeling on the one hand that surely any minute now she will see her mistake, and calculating on the other hand that it is even better for her to walk away with a wrong impression than for me to enter the arena over something so small.




• Well she never sees her mistake; and so she walks away with the belief that I have refused to help her, and also that I have refused even to discuss it. In other words, she walks away with the untrue and unjust belief that I have been unkind and uncaring. These four adjectives should start to sound familiar in this context. But it is something that I allowed to happen by not speaking up.

What do I mean by "calculating … that it is … better for her to walk away with a wrong impression than for me to enter the arena"? Just that I figure I can carry the weight of that small an injustice. It’s not possible to balance all the scales in life, to make every encounter or transaction perfectly fair. Often throughout the week we walk away from encounters or transactions with others where the scales didn’t line up perfectly. The thing is, sometimes they tip in our favor and sometimes in the other guy’s favor; so the reason it is not worth trying to balance them all is that overall they more or less balance out. And so we – wisely – save our effort for the big stuff. For this reason (among others, no doubt) I spent years overlooking the fact that the outcome of these specific interactions were unfairly unfavorable to me. I probably also thought I was being chivalrous by ignoring the issue. (Yes, that was pompous and self-important of me.)

What I neglected to think through was that dripping water wears away rock. Yes, I could carry the weight of any one of these events and never notice the difference (I mean events when Wife walked away thinking untrue and unjust things about me because I declined to defend myself or tell her she was being a blind fool). But this kind of interaction didn’t just happen once or twice. Wife routinely failed (and fails) to see the things I did for her. So this particular interaction probably happened closer to a thousand times. (That sounds like hyperbole, but I really don't think so when you figure in how long we have been together.) And after a thousand repetitions, what is she going to think of me? That I am a man who – on a thousand different occasions – refused to help her and refused even to discuss why I wouldn’t help her. It is no surprise that she thinks I’m a monster. And I, for my part, end up thinking that she is a woman who – on a thousand different occasions – simply could not see that I had already done something nice for her, and immediately got sharpish instead of ever once giving me the benefit of the doubt. It is no surprise that I’m as bitter as I am.

I know that this one, solitary dynamic can’t be at the root of everything; even if I had reacted differently from the very start all those years ago she would still be a narcissist, she would still hoard, she would still make shit up out of thin air, … and all the rest. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that my misguided efforts to avoid conflict, to avoid shaming her, and to avoid making myself small by "standing up for my rights" … that my misguided efforts to avoid all these things by simply tolerating the consequent injustice had the unexpected consequence of poisoning myself and poisoning the marriage. I’m not mooning over "What if?" What’s done is done. The marriage is broken irreparably. I just think it is remarkable how things turn out.