No matter how much I love anybody, sometimes I really disagree with what they want to do, what they want me to do, what music to listen to or not, which movie to rent, and on and on. Usually my partner and I can reach agreement pretty easily; often I do what he would like to do because he works much harder than I do, holding down a full time job and going to school full time as well, and I have plenty of free time for my preferred choices. But the other day he had found a Netflix documentary about a period in NYC when folk music was flowering, and I really wanted to watch it. Most of the folks who were interviewed I had known, and I was hoping there would be pictures of way-back-when–and since it was ‘my time’ I wanted to watch all of the film. He had started to make brunch, so I went into the kitchen to help, and put the film on pause. He was really angry. When he fixes food he likes to listen to music. I explained, he countered, and on it went. Finally, because I finished buttering, toasting and chopping, I returned to the TV and turned it back on. Both of us were very disgruntled and unhappy with one another. The reason I am explaining this whole silly scenario is because I think that most of the stuff that sets us at odds with another person is silly. If he waited five minutes for music, what difference would it make? If I heard what was being said in the video, and it was something I wanted to play again, I could have walked into the other room and hit ‘rewind’. It didn’t really matter, yet each of us thought we were ‘right’. For years and years I apologized to whomever, just so there would’t be this kind of discomfort. But I also decided a long time ago that apologizing when I didn’t think I was at fault was not healthy for me. However…. In my previous life I also would have forced discussion so that he would ‘understand’, which really meant that he would realize he was being foolish. I decided I didn’t want to go down that path. After all, how important was it? Clearly, not very. We could disagree, and not reach understanding, and the world would not come crashing down. He wouldn’t move out. Sooner or later we would feel affection again, and the discomfort would dissipate. So I shut up, didn’t say another word about it and he did as well. We watched the film, which indeed had current footage on people I had known, some well, some not so well way back when, and we ate our brunch together. For once he didn’t call me from work, and I thought, “Hmmm. He’s still angry.” But I didn’t call to ‘make nice’. By the time he came home that evening, he crawled into bed and rolled me into his arms and I let it be. We could be different, we could see an event differently, really differently, and we could still love each other. All those years of fighting and trying to ‘be heard’ with other men, or even with some of my women friends, seemed like such a waste of time and energy. Letting it go, while keeping my sense of what was real and allowing him his–well, that seemed to work much better.
I will be taking a short hiatus. My next blog well be posted on March 3.
