Dear Lorraine,
My wife and I have been married for thirty-eight years. Good years, most of them. We raised three kids, got through some hard stretches, laughed more than we fought. People tell us we’re the couple they hope to be. I used to believe that.
I retired last May from teaching high school history. Ellen retired the year before from the library system. For the first time since 1988, we are both home, all day, every day. I thought it would be wonderful. What I didn’t expect was the quiet.
We eat breakfast together and neither of us says much. We watch television in the evening and I couldn’t tell you what we watched. She reads in the living room. I putter in the garage. We are polite. We are kind. We are two people sharing a house the way you share an elevator, standing close and saying nothing.
I love my wife. I believe she loves me. But I don’t know how to talk to her anymore, and I don’t know when I forgot.
Signed, Quiet in Quincy
Dear Quiet,
I want you to read your letter back and notice something you put there without meaning to. You described thirty-eight years of marriage, three children, hard stretches you survived, laughter that outweighed the fighting, and then you said you don’t know how to talk to her. But you just did. You told a stranger what you haven’t told Ellen, and you told it with precision and tenderness. You have not lost the ability to talk. You have lost the structure that made talking happen without either of you having to choose it.
Here is what I think your letter is really about. For thirty-eight years, your lives were full of interruptions. The kids needed something. The school called. Dinner had to get made. A pipe burst. The dog got out. Those interruptions were not obstacles to your marriage. They were the scaffolding. They gave you something to talk about that was not each other, and that is not a small thing. Most couples don’t sit down and talk about their relationship. They talk about the dog that got out, and somewhere inside that conversation, the relationship is tended. The scaffolding is down now. What’s left is two people and a kitchen table, and you are discovering that you never actually learned how to start a conversation from nothing, because you never had to.
This is not a failure of your marriage. This is a building that lost its scaffolding before anyone remembered to install the stairs.
So here is what I want you to try, and I mean specifically, not “communicate more,” which is advice that helps no one.
Go somewhere together that is not your house. I don’t mean a vacation. I mean the diner on Tuesday morning. The hardware store. A walk around the block after dinner. The house has become the container for the silence, and the silence has soaked into the walls. You need rooms that don’t belong to the quiet yet.
Then: ask her one real question a day. Not “how was your day,” because her day was the same as yours and you both know it. Something with weight. “What’s the thing you thought retirement would be that it isn’t?” Or “Do you remember that week we drove to Michigan with the kids and the car broke down in Indiana?” You are not making conversation. You are opening a door and standing in it and seeing if she walks through.
She might not, the first time. She might look at you like you’ve lost your mind. That’s fine. Ask again tomorrow. You are not trying to fix thirty-eight years. You are trying to start one new conversation.
One more thing. You wrote that you love your wife and you believe she loves you. I notice you said “believe,” not “know.” That word is doing more work than you think. You don’t need to know what she’s feeling right now. You need to be willing to find out, which means being willing to hear something uncomfortable. She may be sitting in her own version of the quiet, waiting for you to say something first. Or she may be fine and unaware you’re struggling. Either way, the only exit from this is through her, and the only way through her is to say out loud what you just wrote to me.
You haven’t forgotten how to talk to your wife, Quiet. You’ve just never had to do it on purpose. Now you do. That’s not a tragedy. That’s Tuesday.
