Something about my food story wasn’t adding up. In the moment it had happened so fast that I didn’t have time to think about it. But through the rest of the day, on and off, I could not shake a nagging question. They say you’re supposed to use wisdom when bringing up potentially touchy subjects. Is your husband stressed? Is he in the middle of doing or thinking about something else? These aren’t good times to brings things up.

But sometimes all the rules can get to be a little much. What’s a life partner if you can’t even ask them a simple question? If everything must be filtered with these carefully measured amounts of striking just the right balance? I imagined him getting a text from his wife in the middle of talking with all of the pastors. The old ball and chain that you can’t get away from. Drinking their beers and talking around the trading post campfire.

And I thought, you know what? He can answer me whenever, but right now in the moment I was ready to verbalize so I texted from the van after class had been dismissed. “I’m just wondering…”, I started out. I wasn’t consciously thinking this then, but John Gottman talks about using soft start-ups. You’re less likely to activate a person’s defenses. “When you heard so-and-so say something about taking the food…”

Why didn’t you say something know that I had already asked for it?

He didn’t know I had asked. It’d been another one of those instances of miscommunication. If he’d known he would’ve said something. And I was satisfied with that. If that’s all it was well then I didn’t have to worry. It didn’t have to be about why I wasn’t important enough to speak up for in a potentially awkward moment, or why he’d left me to do the work of confronting.

“Well I did.” I had to say it. I wasn’t trying to be a pain, contentious, or obnoxious, or heaven forbid like the woman who’d make you rather sit on a roof. Sometimes I think Solomon brought some of that upon himself. And I think it’s unfair that the women didn’t get to write their proverbs. And if he was the one who was so in love, whatever happened to the one he was in love with?

I would’ve said something, he said. And that was that. We moved on to other things, or rather, I drove home, my curiosity satisfied and heart reassured. I went to bed when I got home with him still down at the campfire. I wasn’t sad, I was simply noticing. There was a time when the chance to be at home alone in a bed together was the number one thing either one of us would’ve asked for.

I follow a woman on Instagram @heybeginnerwife. This morning I saw a post where she was saying that she used to get irritated with her husband because he didn’t notice things she did to take care of herself, in this case a manicure. She finally realized she was being silly for putting that pressure on her husband to notice.

I didn’t like the implications. Why does it seem with this kind of advice that the happiness of the woman doesn’t come from actually receiving something she wants? Rather she finds it by realizing she was silly, by denying her desires, in this case, for her husband to notice and compliment her nice nails. Josh was on his way out to make sure coffee was ready in the CGC. I asked him if I could show him this video. He said sure.

And then I said that I was showing him this video because the woman in it said something I didn’t fully like and after the video I was going to explain why I didn’t like it. So if he could find something to affirm in what I said or see my point then that’d be good. And it was actually funnier because I said that. And I was happy.