No, I Will Not Talk To You About My Feelings
When I was younger, talking held a great deal more prominence in my relationships because it was the only form of validation I understood. Talking, gossip, flirting, battle of wits — the chattiness of a young girl’s life was easily transmuted into the realm of desire.
Naturally, when the time came to explore romantic relationships, I wanted it to revolve around talk. I thought everything had to be spoken, explicit, talked about, defined, categorized, discussed. Beginning relationships were marked by hours-long getting-to-know-you sessions wherein we bared our souls and spoke of everything. Probably because our parents were tired of both of us and in the newness of experience, when someone else finds you interesting, the experience is made volcanic by its rareness. Even the endings of relationships are defined by reaching ‘closure’, getting in touch with one’s feelings, the eternal emphasis on constant discussion.
Eventually, one of those talky relationships became a marriage, and the silence crept in. But the silence wasn’t what killed it. The insistence on talking, and placing talk at a premium over the physical proof of love is what killed it. Being too much in our own heads is a neglect of the one activity that reaffirms that we are alive and here on earth: to be present in our own bodies, in closeness, in physical heat and companionship.
My favorite thing is to listen to public conversations at coffee shops. But most of the time, I hear different iterations of the same complaint. He won’t talk. He won’t share his feelings. How can I get closure if we don’t discuss why he left?
On one level, the complaint is valid. He’s not talking because he doesn’t think anything’s wrong. He’s not talking because it’s too much emotional labor and that’s your job. You like extra jobs you didn’t ask for, right? You like inheriting jobs because someone else doesn’t want to do them, right?
I learned that talk comes cheap and isn’t worth much. And if he won’t talk about it, it’s license for me not to talk about it, either. I don’t give a man laundry list of my itemized complaints. Instead, I find the real power is in voting with my feet. When he didn’t see it coming, I agree and say I didn’t see it coming, either.
Cold? Heartless? I accept the charges because I feel like it would be a waste of time to spend five hours arguing with people trained to believe it’s my job to be kind at all costs and his to be negligent whenever it suits his convenience. I know. I’m awful! Isn’t it terrible? I’m a monster. Quickly, drive a stake through my heart to stop me from committing such crimes again.
If the person I’m with won’t make the effort to talk, I won’t either. But here’s the big secret: talking isn’t required.
The physical closeness is key, it’s what defines the reason I’m spending time with you. We need to have a connection based on touch, on skin against skin, on the blood beneath that skin thrumming to meet the other’s, eye to eye, nose to nose, lips to lips. I need to see the proof of who you are in your physical actions.
Maybe this is why I became more silent as the years went on. Because I understood that talking and feelings were nice, but they did not ‘make’ the love I desired in another. And I became tired with talk that did not amount to anything. Meaningless texts, the verbal vomit that amounted to little more than the cries of a needy child, desperate for attention, as expressions of a vast insecurity. I needed the physical commitment, which must be renewed over and over again.
As an adult, I no longer needed to categorize, define, or understand my relationships. I accepted them exactly for what they were, and realized that my desire to talk had more to do with me wanting to force subjects between people when it would be better to wait for them to evolve naturally. When I spoke unnecessarily, talked too much, inserted my thoughts where they were not needed, I created more problems than I solved, made frictions between myself and others that didn’t exist before, when if only I had kept my mouth shut, things would have flowed smoothly. My desire to talk had been more about my anxiety and fear of what would happen if I did not talk, about opportunities I thought I would miss — when in fact, if I had to ask for them, the opportunities never existed in the first place.
You learn a lot from shutting your mouth. I became comfortable with conflict. An argument was merely an argument, and if it happened, it was not the end of the world. I preferred to leave things unspoken. I decided to become like water, flowing where relationships took me instead of trying to force them into incongruent paths through endless talk.
A modern philosopher once explained that this quality was the keeping of mystery — and it is the keeping of mystery that sustains desire in long term relationships more than any other. He used the example of Bluebeard, the story of the the man who would marry a young bride and forbid her to look behind locked doors. Very soon, it becomes apparent that Bluebeard kills his wives and hides their bodies in those same closed rooms that the young bride is forbidden to look in. Death was the punishment for opening the forbidden doors.
But the Bluebeard fairy tale hits on a greater meaning beyond misogynist violence for violence’s sake. It’s about how we kill love by allowing our mysteries to be discovered.
When we talk and use that talk to disclose everything, we leave nothing left to the imagination.
As a result of my growing silence, I became more attractive, more charismatic. People wanted to be near and around me. Imaginations ran wild. I was the closed door Bluebeard had forbidden anyone to open. People wanted to know more about me because I failed to disclose anything. I kept my secrets to myself, and people understood that though my waters were still, I ran deep. I did not have to advertise this fact, it came across in my sense of self-possession, poise, and security. Gone was the girl who ran at the mouth, wanting only to hear how she was loved by someone else. Here now was the grown woman who reclined back upon the throne with a gesture and said only, “Tell me more about yourself.”
I love very passionately, but I do not say it often. I want it to count when I do say it, and so I make it rare. It is not a feeling, but a place to be visited, a closed door brimming with mysterious things of which we will not speak, but which we will witness and touch for ourselves, real, concrete, in the here and now.
In the meantime, silence suffices.
No, I Will Not Talk To You About My Feelings
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