The things I am most interested in, I can’t discuss with my wife. She will lose interest in what I’m saying in less than two minutes and change the topic within five. This is what I get for marrying a person who shares none of my interests and who has completely different tastes in movies, music and books (when she reads at all). I love my wife and consider our marriage a strong one, but there is a disconnect when it comes to the things that I care most about.
It doesn’t have to be a problem. I have friends who share my interests. I can share my thoughts with my journal, with this blog or with a wider community through my writing. There are strategies I can use if and when I want to express my thoughts and feelings about things that interest me. On occasion, I have told my wife this. And she did not agree.
My wife wants me to feel that I can talk with her about everything. To feel it. She has expressed that she is jealous of my journal, because I tell it things that I don’t tell her. My response is that she should be happy, because to her these things are boring and annoyng to her. But it makes her feel bad that I feel I can’t (or shouldn’t) share these things with her.
This is another reason for me to feel that writing is a form of infidelity, which I touched on in a previous post and will probably write more about another time.
My wife, as well as my children, my siblings and parents, aunts and uncles, have no interest in the things I find most intriguing. They also have no interest in the way of thinking that comes naturally to me, and are often annoyed when I refuse to start every thought process with a conclusion, or whenever they ask a question and I begin my response by saying: “It depends.”
Interestingly, my wife lists her ability to be herself with me as one of the primary qualities of our marriage. She says that she feels safe, seen and understood. To me, this is not the case. I do not have the ability to be myself or to feel seen or understood in the marriage. But I also don’t think that the marriage or the family is where a person like myself can shine. I doubt if there is more than a handful of “my kind” in history which felt (or were) seen and understood as what they really were by their own families, unless they were very successful and generally recognized already. Then it’s a different situation, where seeing and understanding becomes a ticket to status by association. My role in the family is simply to be the provider. The other sides of me must breathe elsewhere.
The place for me to see my own reflection is not with my wife or children. There is no reflective surface in the marriage or the family. In order to be myself, I must go elsewhere. And I need to do it covertly, so I don’t make my wife feel bad while pursuing the interests which make me who I am.