A fictionalized marital conversation.
My wife, Laura, was talking about ambition during a drive for coffee. She could not understand people who said they wanted a different career but never took a step toward it.
I saw an opening. This was my first mistake.
“Isn’t that a bit like how I feel about our sex life?” I asked.
Laura turned toward me. The car remained on course; the conversation did not.
I had hoped the word “drive” would do most of the argumentative work. She had career drive. I wanted more sexual connection. Surely the shared noun entitled me to a useful comparison.
“My applying for a job doesn’t require you to want the job too,” she said.
That was an inconveniently clear distinction. I had turned a feeling I needed to explain into a theory she was expected to accept.
By the time we reached the drive-through, I tried again. “I miss being close to you, and I don’t know how to talk about it without making you feel pressured.”
This sentence had fewer moving parts. It also gave her room to tell me how the conversations had felt from her side. Neither of us needed to agree that intimacy operated like a promotion scheme.
We did not solve our differences before the coffee arrived. The employee at the window would probably have been concerned if we had tried. But we agreed to talk later, with time to listen and without one of us having to watch traffic.
I still appreciate a clever analogy. I am learning that my wife sometimes prefers an accurate sentence.
