says, “How long have you felt this way? If I hadn’t just asked if something was up, when were you going to tell me?” I think about how this can’t possibly be happening because just five minutes ago, we picked our movie for the weekend. We’re supposed to be together this weekend. At a movie!
“I don’t know,” he says sheepishly. He shrugs without moving his shoulders. His entire body is a shrug. “It never felt like the right time to bring it up.” (When my therapist friends hear this part of the story, they immediately diagnose him as “avoidant.” When my nontherapist friends hear it, they immediately diagnose him as “an asshole.”)
More silence.
I feel as though I’m viewing this scene from above, watching a confused version of myself move at incredible speed through the famous stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If my laughter was denial and my when-the-hell-were-you-going-to-tell-me was anger, I’m moving on to bargaining. How, I want to know, can we make this work? Can I take on more of the childcare? Add an extra date night?
Boyfriend shakes his head. His teenagers don’t wake up at seven a.m. to play Legos, he says. He’s looking forward to finally having his freedom, and he wants to relax on weekend mornings. Never mind that my son plays independently with his Legos in the mornings. The problem, apparently, is that my son occasionally says this: “Look at my Lego! Look what I made!”
“The thing is,” Boyfriend explains, “I don’t want to have to look at the Legos. I just want to read the paper.”
I consider the possibility that an alien has invaded Boyfriend’s body or that he has a burgeoning brain tumor of which this personality shift is the first symptom. I wonder what Boyfriend would think of me if I broke up with him because his teenage daughters wanted me to look at their new leggings from Forever 21 when I was trying to relax and read a book. I don’t want to look at the leggings. I just want to read my book. What kind of person gets away with simply not wanting to look?
“I thought you wanted to marry me,” I say, pathetically.
“I do want to marry you,” he says. “I just don’t want to live with a kid.”
I think about this for a second, like a puzzle I’m trying to solve. It sounds like the riddle of the Sphinx.
“But I come with a kid,” I say, my voice getting louder. I’m furious that he’s bringing this up now, that he’s bringing this up at all. “You can’t order me up à la carte, like a burger without the fries, like a . . . a—” I think about patients who present ideal scenarios and insist that they can only be happy with that exact situation. If he didn’t drop out of business school to become a writer, he’d be my dream guy (so I’ll break up with him and keep dating hedge-fund managers who bore me). If the job wasn’t across the bridge, it would be the perfect opportunity (so I’ll stay in my dead-end job and keep telling you how much I envy my friends’ careers). If she didn’t have a kid, I’d marry her.
Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness, but ultimately it saves them months of treatment.
“The truth is, I didn’t want to date somebody with a kid,” Boyfriend is saying. “But then I fell in love with you, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“You didn’t fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old,” I say. “You knew what to do then, didn’t you?”
More suffocating silence.
As you’ve probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere. I try to understand if it’s about something else—how could it not be about something else? After all, his wanting his freedom is the ultimate “It’s not you, it’s me” (always code for It’s not me, it’s you). Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he’s afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I’m mindful of the fact that Very Angry People