Untying the Knot
ADAPTATION
While he tends to speak crisply and definitively, my words circle back, my thoughts evolving as I speak. And I, too, ask:
"So how is it that ordinary love ordinarily fails? If love is, as Wallace Stevens suggests, a dwelling ''in which being there together is enough,'' how does silence fall on a thousand evenings and the possibility of intimacy flicker and die? How do lovers become lonely? "
"It's so you to raise questions like that'' he says, in the way that the fondest of phrases -- it's you, darling! I understand you! -- can metamorphose into the bitterest, as caring begins to be seen, through the lens of years, as controlling.
Like most powerful, pervasive dynamics, the tensions found expression in incidents almost too trivial to recollect.
Another way of describing the relationship was that he had more trouble compromising and being in a relationship than I did. It cost him more to accommodate me, so he resented it more. That's as much of a truth as that everything revolved around me.
Over time, we had sex less often, and when we did, we had less of a feeling of reaching one another. The shift was subtle enough that neither of us can place it -- did it happen in Year 5, 6, 10? Without saying so, each attributed the distance to the other.
While he tends to speak crisply and definitively, my words circle back, my thoughts evolving as I speak. And I, too, ask:
"So how is it that ordinary love ordinarily fails? If love is, as Wallace Stevens suggests, a dwelling ''in which being there together is enough,'' how does silence fall on a thousand evenings and the possibility of intimacy flicker and die? How do lovers become lonely? "
"It's so you to raise questions like that'' he says, in the way that the fondest of phrases -- it's you, darling! I understand you! -- can metamorphose into the bitterest, as caring begins to be seen, through the lens of years, as controlling.
Like most powerful, pervasive dynamics, the tensions found expression in incidents almost too trivial to recollect.
Another way of describing the relationship was that he had more trouble compromising and being in a relationship than I did. It cost him more to accommodate me, so he resented it more. That's as much of a truth as that everything revolved around me.
Over time, we had sex less often, and when we did, we had less of a feeling of reaching one another. The shift was subtle enough that neither of us can place it -- did it happen in Year 5, 6, 10? Without saying so, each attributed the distance to the other.
