My girlfriend and I haven’t spoken for a day because I asked how many relationships she’d had. I thought we were talking about exes. She thought I wanted to know how many people she’d slept with.
We were already discussing past relationships, the things we’d experienced and the mistakes we wanted to avoid. The question didn’t seem like a change of subject to me. I was curious about her life before us, and I thought asking was part of getting to know her.
She got extremely angry. What I meant as a question about relationships landed as a request for her body count. Those aren’t interchangeable questions, even if both can involve a number. One can open a conversation about what someone has been through. The other can sound like the beginning of a judgment.
I wasn’t trying to judge her sexual history. That’s the part I keep coming back to when I think about whether I should message her. I know why I asked. From my side, the anger seems to be a response to something I never meant.
But I only know my intention. I don’t know exactly what she heard in the question, or why she heard it that way. I can see that asking for a number might sound different from asking what a past relationship was like. It leaves the number sitting there on its own, without much indication of what I plan to do with it.
We never got far enough to sort out that difference. The question stopped being about her past and became an argument about what I was asking for.
A day probably doesn’t sound like much. For us, it is. This isn’t our usual amount of space between conversations, so I notice it. I haven’t messaged her, either. I’m not simply waiting for a reply to something I’ve sent; I’m choosing to leave the conversation where it stopped.
Part of my hesitation is that reaching out feels like accepting I did something wrong. I don’t believe I did, and I don’t want an apology to mean admitting an intention I didn’t have. Still, explaining myself would be different from agreeing with her interpretation. At the moment, I’ve done neither.
I find myself thinking I’ll have to be the bigger man if we’re going to speak again. There’s frustration in that thought: I’m already assigning myself the work of ending a silence we’re both maintaining. I don’t actually know whether she’s waiting for me or what she would say if I contacted her.
I wanted to learn something about her past. A day later, I still haven’t sent the next message.
