Hey Fam, here are your 3 reasons (why wait?)
Never wait (unless there is a really really good fucking reason to wait) to be vulnerable with your partner.
Your internal voice is just as powerful as your (attachment to) external reactions, listen to it and find the courage to use it.
True companionship is about vulnerability, trust, and respect, not changing someone. Who cares what they do as long as they fill your emotional bank account with what you need when you need it.
“The fucking guy is cheating,” he screams from the office, echoing from the hallway, down the faux laminate cherry wood floor, with crown molding and family pictures where everyone is smiling holding their arms around each other in playful scenarios, all of them resembling love and serenity and togetherness.
She rolls her eyes in the kitchen. He is on the computer playing his games — Starcraft 40 and Warcraft 19 — whatever the fuck the name of the games are these days. So much for men growing up.
“Dinner is almost ready,” she yells.
There is no answer.
Fuckin’ Christ.
She continues to stir the beef stroganoff, his personal favorite, and then chops the parsley in between, waiting to add the finishing touch. It’s a simple dish, but well done. Her mother would be proud — at least of her culinary skills.
Outside the sky is dark and rain is slashing sideways into the windows, with quiet repetitive thumps, like a ticking clock clicking at different intervals. She looks into the reflection of herself in the opaque sliding glass door that goes to the terrace and it doesn’t fit. She doesn’t fit. Her face is sad and she can see the wrinkles around her eyes.
She keeps stirring the beef stroganoff alone.
Only married for three years, she is 29. She is living in a foreign world. She has no friends and her husband comes home from work and plays the computer before loving her. Before talking to her. Before letting her in, if at all. She pours another glass of wine and sips it gently.
Stupid fucking video games. I’d like to cut the nuts off the guy that invented Atari, then Nintendo, and whatever else there is being made to entertain men in gorilla-type-warfare fashion.
“You want some wine honey? It’s fruity, not to dry, just the way you like it.”
There is no answer again.
A few minutes later, “Hey babe, did you say something?” he screams back, in between grunts and cuss words that are undecipherable.
“No,” she says. “Nevermind.”
She adds the parsley and stirs the green flakes into the white-blanched sauce and tastes it with her finger. It’s perfect. She spoons the noodles onto the plates and sets the table and lights a candle, hoping he will notice, but she knows he won’t.
They have no kids. The house is quiet. They moved from their friends and family in Chicago and live in North Dakota. He took a high paying upper management job for Proctor and Gamble, which is rare for someone his age. He is truly talented with work. He makes things happen, and isn’t afraid to stand up the to the higher ups. That’s what she fell in love with him for in the first place — his ambition and drive and ability to try and improve everyday.
She just doesn’t care for his incessant drive to improve his abilities at fucking winning video games.
The tears slide into the corners of her eyes and she blinks them back, fighting the urge to throw a plate at his head and tell him to look up from his computer screen and smile at her, reassure her he still loves her, wants to fuck her madly and passionately, and then, oh yeah, be her best friend.
He does neither of the three.
Instead she stares at a plate of noodles and flank steak beef.
“Honey. The food is on the table. You hungry?”
“Yes, just one minute. I need to win. Just a second, babe.”
She turns on the TV and plunges into the designer leather couch. A show on E about a porn star and a professional basketball player takes her mind off things. They are fighting about something: about him not calling her while he was on the road playing in the NBA and she is mad, fuming, and screaming, and saying you don’t love me anymore, you don’t (beeping) love me anymore, the woman with jet black hair screams. Then she lurches down, puts her head between her hands, and tears come, pouring out of her like a category five hurricane. He stamps out of the video and pushes the camera-man aside.
“I don’t need this shit,” was the last thing the tall, razor thin, bald black man said that the microphone picked up.
She moves to the rickety diner set he made for her and clicks her chin into the bottom of her palm and remembers how things used to be. She wonders, why can’t she scream at her husband like the woman on the reality show — make him comprehend the pangs of loneliness in her heart, the fucking wanton of passion in her mind and between her legs, waiting to be released like a wild pack of piranhas feasting on a unsuspecting victim swimming in their waters.
Why couldn’t she just fucking tell him how much of a dumbass he was being?
She didn’t want to babysit him. She wasn’t there to scold him. He was a man. It wasn’t her job to tell him. He should see her attempts. To share. To build. To work together. To laugh. She was sick of doing things for him.
Her tank was empty.
If nothing else, he should know by the way their sex is lackluster, empty, and distant; by the way he has an orgasm too fast and rolls over to sleep without saying good night. The way he lets go of her hand before he actually holds it.
She rolls a bite of beef stroganoff into her mouth and chews it slowly, savoring the flavor. He isn’t perfect. What does he do well?
He does kiss her goodbye every day. He does try to do things for her — like making coffee in the morning, or telling her she doesn’t need make-up, or building the diner set that wobbles too much. He asks about her day and wants to know what she is doing.
He walks the dogs after work with her most days, but is silent and lost in his mind, fixating on the billowing clouds on the horizon, or making sure Bull, his Pitbull heels, or watching the flocks of geese escape into the Rocky Mountains to the East.
How hard should they try at being happy?
Is he trying at all?
He is at times. Maybe he isn’t happy here. She knows this in the way he fakes smiles and wraps his mind into things that wrap his mind around anything that isn’t work related.
Maybe they should leave. Maybe things will get better. She serves the beef stroganoff and smears the wet lashes away from her eyes as she waits.