This was the phase of our relationship we were in during that hike in the Shenandoah Valley, when I made the comment about the bear and she went quiet. Predictably, then, when I asked her what was wrong, she said, “Nothing.” Eventually I learned that this response was not meant to shut me out, which was how it felt, so much as to shut herself in, to buy a little time to convince herself that it was true. The same went for “I’m fine” when she was not: I experienced it as a blatant lie (which it was), but she meant it as a relative assessment, a way of persuading herself that whatever was bothering her was either irrational or insignificant in the context of our relationship. And in the context of the world, too: for C., who sometimes struggles to believe that her own emotions matter, “fine” was also a way to cut her problem down to size, to remind herself that she was neither bleeding to death nor succumbing to famine.
Both reactions were consistent with a larger part of C.’s character, which is that she is a genuine stoic. Once, speaking of yellow jackets, she was out gardening and I was inside making lunch when I heard the front door open and close. I went about my business, figuring that she had come inside to use the bathroom, but a few minutes later, when I’d heard nothing more, I hollered amiably from the kitchen to make sure she was okay. “Stay where you are,” she said evenly, so of course I did nothing of the sort, which is how I discovered that she had accidentally jammed a shovel into a wasps’ nest out under an old tree stump in our yard and was now standing in the bathroom, shaking live ones from her shirt and killing them. She had been stung upward of twenty times and made less noise than the moon when it sets. Had I not come to check on her, I imagine she would have gone on to treat her stings and change her clothes and sometime later told me that I shouldn’t go outside for a while because there were a bunch of wasps flying around. And she would have preferred it that way because, in keeping with her stoicism, she hates to be fussed over. (That’s a preference I cheerfully ignore these days, partly because one of the great pleasures of being in love is fussing over your partner and partly because her position is untenably unilateral: she loves to fuss over me.)
As someone who gets teary-eyed at rom-coms, analyzes my feelings about my feelings, and shows off my cuts and bruises like a six-year-old, I naturally find stoicism absurd. But the truth is that C. really is good at self-soothing, both physically and emotionally, and if I had been able to leave her in peace for twenty minutes that day on the trail, the whole thing would have blown over like the wispy little cirrus clouds overhead. But I could not, so I goaded her into talking to me, whereupon I learned that what she had heard, in “just out hiking for the day” was dismissiveness—an implication that the activity we were engaged in was a pale version of what I really wanted to be doing.
There was some context for this. In the long solitude of my life before I met C., I had spent as much time as I could in the wilderness. She knew how deeply at peace I was in the backcountry—especially in the mountains, especially out West—and she worried that she had taken me away from something I needed and loved. What I should have done was tell her that I needed and loved her, that I treasured the texture of the life we were making together, and anyway that it was not a zero-sum game; the mountains could not take me away from her, but I could take her to the mountains. Instead, confused and hurt by how she could have heard in my idle observation something so cutting and so contrary to how I actually felt, I got defensive and told her that I hadn’t meant that at all, that I had meant only exactly what I had said, and that after all it did seem surprising to encounter a bear during a relatively short afternoon hike. The trouble was that this had been a poorly thought-out comment the first time around and did not improve with repetition. You don’t need to know anything about the distribution of black bears in Shenandoah to know that, in places full of people who are irresponsible with food, they are perfectly likely to hang out near popular trails. C., who hadn’t wanted to talk about her feelings in the first place, was only too happy to take advantage of this logical weakness and argue instead about bears.
This is how couples wind up fighting about idiotic things. I can remember, one summer vacation when I was young, sitting with my sister on the front steps of a little rental cabin in northern Michigan while my parents had an epic fight inside. I was alarmed—a peacemaker even then, it terrified me when they argued—but my sister, three years older and cool-headed enough to understand that the spat in question was not going to end in divorce, was amused. “Do you know what they’re fighting about?” she asked, by way of comforting me. I did not. “They’re fighting because Dad forgot to get tuna fish at the store,” she said. How do people who love each other wind up in a raging fight about tuna fish, I wondered at the time. Now I knew.
It took C. and me over a year to work it out (not the bear; the general problem of how we fought), and the solution did not turn out to be what I thought it would. At first I tried to stop pounding so soon and so loudly on the walls of her privacy when she was upset, and she tried not to leave me alone for too long in the tundra of her retreat. But however important compromises may be in international relations, they seldom work well in personal ones, especially not for differences that run deep; you can’t build a long, happy life together by abandoning or altering core parts of yourself. Instead, what ultimately changed was not something within us but something between us. This happened after one particularly bad fight (in Tuscaloosa, of all places, which gave it, retroactively, the quality of a country song: the very name is plaintive and darkly comic, a geographic losing streak), during which we both genuinely thought we might break up. We did not, obviously, but we scared ourselves very badly. Afterward, we experienced a relief equal in size to that fear, but far more illuminating: we were, very definitely, not going to break up—not in Tuscaloosa, not right then, not anywhere, not ever.
That realization acted much as wedding vows are meant to do, shifting something fundamental between us. It became clear, almost immediately, that the fear of losing each other had fueled nearly all of our fights, turning ordinary misunderstandings and differences of opinion into unnecessary crises. Her insistence on self-soothing had had an element of the apocalyptic to it; in withdrawing from me, she was not only trying to let go of whatever was bothering her but also rehearsing life without me, trying to prove to herself that she would be fine if I left. Meanwhile, I rushed to resolve things because I had no illusion at all that I would be fine if she left, and no ability to calm down and recognize that she was not on the verge of doing so. But after Tuscaloosa, we realized—not abstractly, not intermittently, not only when all was well between us, but all the time and absolutely—that no one was leaving. She stopped bracing for it; I stopped reacting as if it were already happening. And just like that, the panic went out of our disputes, and something very much like levity entered them.
In this sense, love is the kind of problem that Carl Gauss, the mathematician, would have recognized: you may know with absolute certainty that you have the correct answer yet still need a long time to work out the details. Once you do, though, the solution will seem, as solutions so often do, obvious and elegant, and it will render the confusion that came before it borderline unimaginable. C. and I still disagree from time to time, and I hope we always will; the sovereignty of her mind, the way it challenges mine, is one of the things I cherish most about her, and I can’t bear the thought of how impoverished my life would be without it. (“Nobody contradicts me now,” Queen Victoria wrote after the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, “and the salt has gone out of my life.”) Occasionally, those disagreements flare up into arguments, but these days we stick to the actual issue at hand, and generally work our way through it, if not always comically and tenderly, then at least sanely and quickly. As often as not, now, she steps toward me, to soothe or reconcile, and just as often, I step back—not to pull away from her, but because that is a good position from which to really see someone. This is you, I think, being you, and love her for it.
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