Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
She does not banter brilliantly! She misses my clever references! Is she trying to tell me something?
Aug 27, 2002 | Dear readers,
First, I would like to address a question that came up over breakfast.
This girl used to know this guy. They may even have dated, but they were never close. One day after years of not hearing from him she gets a phone message. He suggests they maybe have some coffee. She likes this guy. She'd like to go out with him. But she doesn't want to seem too eager. So she doesn't return his call right away. And then a few days later when she finally returns his call, she is leaving a message for him and his voice-mail software announces that his mailbox is full. So she hangs up, midmessage, and doesn't know for sure if she left the message successfully or not.
She could call again but she doesn't want to seem too eager. But if he didn't get her message he will think she has dissed him. But she fears that if she is drawn into explaining to him that she isn't sure if he got the message but wanted to make sure -- not that it's that important to her anyway! -- it will come out not only that she really is, if not desperate, at least eager but also that she delayed calling for no good reason except she did not want to seem desperate or eager, which now seems, to her, like a less-than-admirable reason not to call someone back. And it seems like it's getting too complicated to explain. And is she going to seem like a dork if she ... Hold it right there! We need go no further! There's a general principle at work here: Always return phone calls promptly. It's not about making somebody think this or that; it's about being a responsible, polite adult. Responsible, polite adults return phone calls promptly. It's that simple. Even very, very busy people are able to return phone calls promptly. Delaying doesn't make you seem desirable or busy; it just makes you seem flaky.
But suppose you want to heighten his sense of anticipation. Fine. Suggest a date for two weeks from now. Suppose you want him to believe you are very busy and desirable, or that you are seeing another man, or that you are about to become engaged to a rock star who is touring Finland but will be back next month. Whatever it is you want him to believe, delaying returning a phone call is not the way to make him believe it. It's too vague. There's no way to know what it will make him believe. It leaves too much up to his imagination. The way to make him believe what you want him to believe is to tell him convincingly. That might involve lying and it might not.
Clarity about your own motives is liberating.
Dear Cary,
I grew up in one of those houses where the parents were enormously intelligent but didn't know it, so they put themselves down and put their kids down. Every emotion was acceptable except positive ones. I learned by negative example. I looked after myself and my little sister and managed to grow up and create the kind of life that I want. However, it took me a number of years to get over the idea that I was not some emotionally vulnerable weakling and so I never had my first sexual girlfriend/boyfriend relationship until I was 36 (I'm 38 now).
He's the first man I've ever had sex with (although not the only -- don't ask, it has little bearing on the situation or him and there's no guilt involved), but I feel that I have hit the jackpot. He is my friend. I can tell almost anything to him (except those things that women are wiser to keep from men, not because they shouldn't be told, but just because guys don't need to be made to wince over their pasta). He hugs me and cuddles me. He picks up on emotional stuff that I am often naive to (it is still a foreign language to me in some respects). He thinks I'm intelligent and creative and wonderful. I know he sometimes wonders how he got me (I picked him). He's kind, intelligent, insightful, big-hearted and ...
He doesn't recognize these things about himself. In some respects it's like being back home with my parents -- he drinks too much, is frozen by self-doubt after a bad business experience that fell apart at Christmas last year (it was a good time, let me tell you), he's gaining weight and he's got a huge underlying font of anger that he let loose on morons once in a while (nothing physical yet). For the most part, he keeps all this away from me and when he's with me he is emotionally available, loving, kind, supportive.
I try to help by pointing out all the wonderful things he does (we went on vacation and in three days of being together, I saw him help more people than I did in a year). I point out how emotionally attuned he is (I sent him to my doctor for a checkup and he noticed that she was shy in the first 10 minutes -- something I didn't realize for two years). He aspires to some presence in the community and I've talked to him about how bullying some guy in a bar is not going to gain him the respect he wants (to which he laughed, half-embarrassed, and said it didn't seem fair that he couldn't do both). I point to his previous business successes and tell him how he should invest in himself, as those investments have always paid off.
Is there something else I can do to help him? How did your wife help you stop drinking? Did she? I love him so much and want him to be happy.
Would-be Florence Nightingale
Dear Florence,
Sometimes people write with very specific problems: Should I invite my mother to my second wedding or not? My boyfriend seems to have moved out; does that mean he is breaking up with me? Letters such as yours, on the other hand, do not pose questions as much as mysteries. It is like finding a torn photograph where the onlookers' faces show concern or horror but the object of their gaze has been removed. You can only guess what actually happened. It is at such moments that I feel more like a fortuneteller than an advice columnist; I do not analyze, I conjure.
So conjure I shall: Growing up as you did, you may have gotten into the habit of taking care of others before yourself, as a way of holding together those fragile bonds of love amid the carping and finely honed despair. But you got out of that family, and knowing you had to take care of yourself, you put off getting involved romantically and put together a life for yourself. Good for you. Having done that, however, you felt ready for a relationship, and now that you're in one, it feels eerily familiar.
I would bet that your family role as caretaker, worrier, consoler and fixer has returned, with those same old questions: Can I change this person? Can I help him see in himself what I see in him, help him reach his true potential? Can I save him from himself? Can I ease his pain?
You can't change people. That's just a black-and-white fact. You can set examples and you can entertain and comfort, and you can observe people change in response to the examples you set, but you can't change them. Incidentally, since you asked, my wife didn't really help me stop drinking, but she made life a lot more tolerable and interesting while I was doing it.
The problem-solving techniques we learn in early family life often reassert themselves later when we get into close relationships. So there you are, trying to fix your boyfriend's drinking. You can't do it. If you love him, I think you should stick with him, but you may have to accept a lot of behavior that every bone in your body is aching to try to change. So decide what's absolutely unacceptable and set some boundaries; be prepared to walk out if he violates them: criminal violence, heroin addiction, that sort of thing. If he's in a downward spiral, you may have to move on. But if he's just muddle-headed but moving forward, things will probably get better.
Meanwhile -- and this also is in the realm of conjuring -- I get a strong feeling that you need to read great works of literature, listen to music and spend time in art galleries. Read Greek tragedies, read Dostoevsky, read Shakespeare and Ibsen and Chekhov; don't ask me why or how I know this: I'm just conjuring. You've had a lot of buried pain. Read the masters, look at paintings, listen to intolerably long symphonies.
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