by David Finch
“Well, thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think I’m a great husband yet. I’m getting better, but I want to do more.”
“Okay,” she said, rubbing a dab of lotion onto the bottom of her foot. “So, what does this have to do with changing our lives for the better?”
I explained that since my epiphany in Chicago, I had come to appreciate her and our marriage on a whole new level. More than ever, I wanted to be the best husband I could be, but I feared I wouldn’t get there without a more formal approach to my process of Best Practices.
“I think we need to start conducting performance reviews on a regular basis,” I said. “We need to be able to monitor my progress and identify areas that still need improvement.”
“Performance reviews? You can’t do this to yourself, Dave. Really. Things are fine.”
“Fine isn’t excellent. Come on. Surely there are things I still need to work on. Name a few. Let’s hear it.”
Finally, Kristen looked me square in the eye. “Dave, seriously, you need to stop. This is stupid.” She ran the tub water to rinse her hands, as though the conversation were already over.
“It’s not stupid,” I said. “It’s brilliant.” I clearly wasn’t gaining any ground. I knew Business-Man could have easily sold her on the idea of performance reviews, but apparently this wasn’t the time or place for Business-Man. I was going to have to get Kristen’s buy-in using my own devices. Namely, badgering. “Kristen, I mean it, let’s hash this out. How am I doing on communication? What’s my score? Fair? Average? Excellent?”
“Oh boy.” She winced. “This ought to be fun.”
“What? What’s your problem?”
“You want to know what still needs work, Dave? Empathy.” Kristen stood up, pointing the foot lotion at me. Uh-oh. “How about that, Dave? I’m trying to relax and do my thing and you march in here, telling me what a lousy person you are and how I need to hold you accountable to some ridiculous standard that you’re putting on yourself. And I feel like I’m telling you every day, ‘We’re good. Relax. I’m happy.’ But you can’t let it go. And no matter what I say, you ignore it and tell me how I need to feel. I’m so sick of this.”
She stood there, arms akimbo, glaring at me. I didn’t know what to say. This was not the reaction I’d hoped for. All I was trying to do was to get her to sign off on my brilliant idea, and now I didn’t know if I should argue back, or apologize, or what. Then, before I could figure out how to respond, Kristen took a deep breath, ran her hands through her hair, and calmly, as though she suddenly remembered that she was speaking to her husband and not her husband’s syndrome, said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up, Dave. I love your brain to pieces but it handles empathy rather differently, and I get frustrated.”
“I understand.” I smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Because this clearly needed to be about her for a moment, I didn’t bother to mention that my lack of empathy was frustrating for me as well. But it was.
Although I now knew enough to say “I understand” in moments like these, I hadn’t made a whole lot of improvement since last summer when we began working on my difficulty with empathy. For example, while I had become much better at listening, I still needed to be told when to listen. I continued to have difficulty inferring the true emotional meaning behind Kristen’s body language and the things she said to me; I was constantly asking her to clarify her statements and emotions. All of this, as far as I was concerned, was more evidence supporting my theory that true empathy is God-given and damned hard to learn. I couldn’t build up my empathy skills because I had none to start with; I felt like a weight lifter who’d been born without biceps. My Empathy Quotient was still a crummy fifteen out of eighty. Unless we figured out a way to make do, my deficiencies in empathy would continue to test our relationship. If I wanted to be the ideal partner, I knew that we would have to resolve this issue once and for all.
Kristen sat back down on the edge of the tub and stared blankly at her toes. It didn’t take a mind reader to ascertain that she felt sad and annoyed. I could have apologized once again and left her alone, but that didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I kept the conversation going.
“As for empathy,” I said carefully, “I can learn to tune in to your feelings, and I can learn how to be more responsive. You’ll just have to tell me what you’re feeling and what I need to do. At first, anyway, before it becomes second nature like all the other stuff we’re working on.”
Kristen closed her eyes and massaged her forehead with her fingertips.
“Like, right now,” I said. “Obviously, you’re thinking something. Are you still annoyed? Are you sad? What is it?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
I sat down next to her, rested my elbows on my knees, and folded my hands. But I didn’t look her in the eye. Instead, like her, I stared down at her manicured toes while she wiggled them up and down. “Kristen, this is what I’m talking about. You have to help me understand what you’re thinking if we’re ever going to get anywhere.”
“I just wish this wasn’t so hard for you,” she said, finally. “I just wish that you were normal. And I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It’s just . . .” I glanced up at her reflection in the mirror and saw that she was trying not to cry.
“Go ahead,” I said, folding my arms. “Say what you need to say.”
“Me telling you what I’m feeling every five seconds and how I need you to react is not empathy.”
“No, it’s not. But we’re not talking about empathy anymore. We’re talking about what happens after empathy. We’re talking about sympathy. Feeling your emotions and responding to your needs are different things. I think I can be more tuned in and responsive without this magic ability to divine whatever it is you’re feeling. We’ll just work on it together, like we’re working on everything else.”
She nodded, looking somewhere beyond the bathroom door.
“I mean, who knows? Maybe it will become second nature to me. I’ll just be walking around, reading your cues, knowing what’s up without having to ask. I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I get it. You’re late for work and you can’t find your other shoe. Maybe it’s not the best time to share my idea for an invisibility cloak.’ ”
She kept nodding, kept staring. But now she was smiling. “Yep. That’ll be you.”
I sat up and wrapped my arm around her waist.
“Oh, oh, hang on,” I said softly. “I think it’s starting to work already. I’m empathying something.”
“Oh, really?” She chuckled and blew her nose into a wadded-up tissue that she’d removed from her pocket. I thought it was gross that she had been carrying it around, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
“Yeah, wait, I’m getting a reading. It’s a strong one. Okay, I’m empathying that you . . . are incredibly turned on by your husband right now and you feel a strong desire to have sex with him, preferably within the next ten to twenty minutes. Am I right?”
She laughed. “Totally right. You’re an amazingly quick study.”
“Good. See? I know this will work. And I’m telling you, these performance reviews are going to be the best things for us.”
Kristen rolled her eyes and chuckled again. “Okay, fine. We’ll try it. What do you want me to do?”
I described my vision for how the performance reviews could be structured and the sorts of things we might accomplish. For our first one, I suggested that we focus primarily on how I could be more responsive to her needs. “That’s a good place to start,” she said. “Just give me a few days to get my thoughts in order.”
A couple days later, we convened in the bedroom after the kids were asleep. I powered up my laptop while Kristen changed into her pajamas and washed her face. I had been preparing myself for something rather formal. Something with charts and spreadsheets and a clearly defined agenda. I had even reserved one of the laptop projectors from the office and brought it home. I was making room on top of my nightstand for it when Kristen walked out of t
he bathroom, pointed to it, and asked, “What’s that thing for?” Then she made me take it downstairs.
When I returned she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed with a spiral notebook on her lap. Our bed is very tall, and sitting there alone on the pillow-top mattress, sinking into the thick quilt, Kristen appeared to be floating on a cloud. I had intended to sit in the leather chair in the far corner of the bedroom, thinking it would lend the discussion a veneer of formality, but Kristen in her PJs made the bed too inviting. I arranged myself across from her, propped up by pillows that I’d stacked against the headboard, and rested my laptop on my legs.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.
“If you’re ready to evaluate my performance and talk about ways that I can be more responsive to you, then I definitely want to listen.”
“Okay. It’s just a lot to drop on you all at once, and I feel bad about that, but I don’t know how else to do it.”
“There is no other way to do it. This is the real value of performance reviews. Trust me.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just know that, in general, I’m very happy and I don’t mean for any of this to hurt you. I don’t want you to freak out.”
“I won’t freak out.”
“And seriously. Turn off your computer.”
I did, and at her request, I listened as she spoke. I didn’t challenge her comments or derail her train of thought. I just listened.
She started by discussing the things she felt were going well. More help with the housework, lots more constructive conversation and friendly, casual chitchats, which she loved so dearly. She thanked me for the littler, less critical Best Practices I’d been working on, such as coming to bed more quietly and not talking with a phony British accent so much.
Then she turned a page in her notebook. There were still a few areas of family interest that needed to improve, she said. My level of participation with the kids, for one thing. “Also, you need to learn to anticipate your own meltdowns before they happen so that you can manage them better in front of our kids, or better yet, deactivate them altogether. The kids can’t see you flipping out all the time.”
She turned another page, and things got serious. We had stepped into sensitive territory. Kristen began talking about times I had let her down and the pattern of selfishness and unresponsiveness she’d dealt with throughout our marriage. As she related a series of painful incidents, incidents that I would have rather not thought about, I was forced to consider her perspective on some of the darkest moments in our marriage, the worst of which being the time that I was home on Christmas vacation two years before. I had been looking forward to two weeks of R & R. But Kristen used the time that I was home to do things for herself that she never had a chance to do, getting her hair cut, getting caught up on work, and visiting with friends, while I stayed home alone with the kids. The first week was exhausting and I quickly became bitter and angry. My vacation was harder work than work was, and I was agitated by the unexpected shift in my plans. One afternoon I finally snapped and said the ugliest words I’ve ever said to Kristen: “This is unfair because unlike you, I can’t just pack up the kids and ship them over to Mary’s all week and then pretend like I’ve been raising them.” Hearing this, Kristen looked broken. Her face, her eyes, her entire body seemed cold and lifeless as she said the only words she could muster: “Fuck you, Dave.” She left the house without telling me where she was going. She returned a few hours later, and that night, standing in the kitchen with the same defeated expression, asked me, “Do you want to be in this marriage anymore? If we ended it tomorrow, would you even care?”
Kristen’s voice trembled as she told me how she had felt alone and depressed in these moments. Her grip on the notebook had tightened and I saw that her handwriting on these pages was uncharacteristically frantic. Certain words had been underlined multiple times—high maintenance, and TOO MUCH DRAMA!!!
“I do not appreciate all your little comments about Mary raising our kids. Mary is not raising our children, Mary is watching our children. There is a difference. I am raising our children, Dave, and I happen to work. In fact, lots of moms work. It hurts me when you say shit like that, and it’s not fair . . .”
She went on, and I started feeling overwhelmed. It was not only the cumulative weight of all these painful experiences but the urge to make up for them as soon as possible. I couldn’t erase five years of relative neglect and misunderstanding, but I could make sure it wouldn’t happen anymore. Enough was enough. But first I had to stop her.
“Kristen?”
She set her notebook down. “What?”
“I’m sorry for interrupting you. But I need to take notes.”
“Go right ahead.”
The Best Practices worked because I wrote them down. I worked through my thoughts on paper, and I distilled them into rules I could follow. Once an idea existed on paper it felt more tangible. I could touch it, stare at it, carry it around with me, or put it away when I needed to. It couldn’t disappear as mental notes sometimes did. At work, I wrote everything down. Why wouldn’t I make the same effort at home? Nothing could have been more important than what Kristen had chosen to share with me—honest emotions and insights into how my behaviors had hurt her and driven a wedge between us. We had laid the groundwork over the past eleven months, and whether she knew it or not, she was presenting me with what I’d come to know as my “advanced topics”—goals that would have been far beyond my reach a year before. Goals that would elevate our relationship to new heights. Here Kristen thought she was just venting, but because I’d chosen to listen, she was actually giving me direction.
I grabbed my journal and over the next hour, I took three pages of notes on areas where I wanted to show improvement. Three more pages to add to my Journal of Best Practices.
Of all the people I know, I’m the only one who would ever take notes during an ass-kicking. But it was the greatest thing I could have done. Taking notes allowed me to slow down the discussion, to understand her points. It also provided some emotional buffer. Rather than getting overly emotional, I could respond constructively and focus on decoding the underlying problems and solutions. It allowed me to be proactive rather than defensive. Slowing the emotions down by taking notes was the best way for me to process what she said and use it to influence real change in my behaviors.
The upside was that by the end of the evening I was holding in my hands a road map to marital happiness. The downside was that real action would be required to pull it off—none of the comments suggested I rest on my laurels or take more naps. From everything she’d told me that evening, it was clear that if we were going to move forward, then I was going to have to become a well-functioning, fully autonomous man. Or, as I discovered during our laundry fiasco a few months earlier, I was going to have to become an adult. She had been right after all; this was not going to be easy.
Kristen fell asleep not long after we finished talking. I didn’t want to go to bed without a plan for turning things around once and for all, so while she slept, I analyzed my notes in an attempt to extract some kind of strategy:
—Respect Kristen’s personal time and space.
—Be more involved with the kids.
—Manage yourself and your emotions—Kristen shouldn’t have to do that.
—Have fun while we do things rather than making everything a “drama fest.”
The single unifying concept seemed to be: Kristen and the kids need you to be able to manage yourself by yourself. Sitting on the bed, with Kristen sound asleep, I once again found myself with a worthy goal and no idea how to define the first step toward achieving it. I was ready to call it a night when one of my notes leaped out at me from the page: Help lighten her burden by showing initiative once in a while.
There it was. I realized that if I could take initiative when it came to things like stabilizing my moods then Kristen would be able to go about her day without having to worry about what might set me off.
With a sense of initiative, I might actually vacuum once in a while or take the kids to the grocery store so that Kristen could enjoy some downtime—downtime that would be sweetened by the fact that she didn’t have to ask for it. Initiative could make me seem more empathic. Boo-yah.
I wrote the word Initiative on a scrap of paper and taped it to the bottom of my mirror in the bathroom. I would see it whenever I washed my hands, brushed my teeth, or shaved, and it would remind me of what I needed to do that day to be the husband I knew Kristen deserved.
Chapter 10
Give Kristen time to shower without crowding her.
The next morning, I woke up at seven o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual. I looked around the empty bedroom, heard the kids playing downstairs, and it occurred to me that Kristen had been downstairs with the kids for an hour and a half. Oh, shit, I thought. I have a new stack of Best Practices to work on.
With that, I headed straight for the bathroom. I meant to study the features of my face for a little while, but there, taped to the mirror, was my scrap of paper: Initiative.
Damn it.
After washing my hands, I shuffled over to my nightstand and pulled out my notes from the previous evening. In determined handwriting I had scrawled Kristen needs time in the morning to shower and get ready for work. Compared to the more advanced topics on the list, such as Be more present in our family’s moments and Take a break from your own head once in a while, the shower-time thing seemed relatively easy to master. I’d start there.
Normally on workdays, Kristen would wake up at five thirty or six, a few minutes before the kids, and try to take a quick shower. Inevitably the shower would wake up Emily because her room was next to our bathroom. Emily would toddle past me, sound asleep in my bed, to join Kristen in the bathroom until she finished showering. Then they’d wake up Parker and go downstairs for breakfast. After breakfast (so I’m told) Kristen would play with the kids before returning to our bathroom to finish getting ready, while they crowded her and played at her feet. All I ever saw of this process was the tail end, when Kristen would emerge from the bathroom to kiss me good-bye and tell me she was taking the kids next door to Mary’s. That’s when my day would begin.