incommunicado

How can a woman not want to talk to her husband about their relationship? I thought that's what women were supposed to be all about. Sure that's a stereotype, but stereotypes don't generally come from nowhere. I guess she is one of the outliers.

But, damn, hasn't she ever watched Oprah!?! Doesn't everyone know that communication is the key to a happy relationship?

And, no, we weren't talking about anything sensitive like her personal history. More generic stuff like, "why haven't you built the dog house yet, Mark?"

But getting to that was like pulling teeth. And she was angry that I wanted to talk at all. Asking her why it made her angry made her angrier still.

Whew!

What's a boy to do?!?

Incidentally, I had a paranoid flurry this afternoon, wondering if she had cheated on me. Later on I was up some scaffolding which made me rather nervous. Would those tiny bolts and rotten-looking planks really hold my weight? I walked softly, and my imagination of how I might crash to the earth went into over-drive.

After an hour of walking around, I felt great -- as if I was on terra firma. And the anxieties about infidelity disappeared, completely replaced by the exhileration of wandering around 30 feet up in the air on a beautify sunny day.

And I realized that these two experiences were linked. I had anxiety about heights, which sent my imagination into overdrive, making my anxiety worse. I tested out my theories of plummeting to the earth by walking around. I didn't fall. I gained confidence. And soon all thought of rotten wood or loose bolts disappeared from my mind as if nothing more than a dream.

I think that's why I wanted so badly to reach out to Sue tonight to talk. Subconsciously my anxieties about her fidelity had not yet been tested and disproven. Not that I wanted, or needed, to raise that question with her directly. Rather, I think I needed to reconnect with her emotionally. When I walked on the scaffolding, my fear was that the wood or the bolts wouldn't hold me -- but I didn't check a single bolt, or examine any of the wood. My groundless fears were answered simply by walking around and not falling. I came to feel safe. So it was with Sue. I didn't want to probe the technical question of fidelity. I think subconcsciously I wanted to connect with her; to feel safe with her; to form a bond with her. With that bond of communication in place, the anxieties disappear of their own accord. Without it my mind becomes their plaything in which they fester and multiply, driving me nuts, and no doubt subtly undermining our relationship as well, even if I never give voice to them.