Enjoy the Silence
I use AI to help organize my thoughts. The life, the mistakes, and the marriage — all mine.
Depeche Mode said it better than I ever will. You already know the words.
Words are very unnecessary...
For a long time, silence in my marriage scared me. Silence meant something was wrong. Something I did. Something I missed. Something I needed to fix right now. And honestly sometimes it was just that. I won't pretend it wasn’t. My wife and I wife have been making the same commute for twelve years. We work together. We eat lunch together almost every day. There were days we sat in the car and said nothing, both of us staring straight ahead, pretending like whatever argument or disagreement from the night before wasn't sitting between us. Yup awkward. Those were the hard ones. And yeah, sometimes the silence was totally on me. We got through it and here we are but it took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand what the silence was actually telling me.
But something changed when I started learning what perimenopause actually does and how it works. Not just to my wife's body but also to her mind. Her brain doesn't stop. It's not just the perimenopause hormones running underneath everything. Her cycle is still going on top of all that. Being a mom doesn't stop for any of it. And for a lot of women you throw in being the eldest daughter, managing her own parents while managing everything else in her life at the same time. All of it running every day, all at once. So when she goes quiet, it is not about you. It never was. The quiet is her carrying something you can't see and probably couldn't name even if she tried to explain it.
Took me way too long to get that. I kept turning her silence into something about me. What did I do? What did I miss? How do I even fix this? That's not support. That's just me making her stillness my problem to solve, which made it worse all the time. What I understand now is that sometimes doing nothing is the most useful thing I've got. We'll eat lunch in my office and barely say a word. Commute home with music and no conversation. Other times we enjoy the silence. When I know she's had a hard day. I don't ask twenty questions. I'll just give her the space to read her books. This is still a work in progress. And I tend to be a little annoying at times.
But I keep myself busy.
I'm almost 50 and started playing Fortnite Rocket Racing specifically, go ahead and judge me. (And to all the Bhoppers out there. How about you give some old guys a chance to reach Elite. I only have till October to prove my boys wrong. I bet them I can make Elite and I'm currently sitting in Champion. So every time you see me out there racing, I challenge you to beat me, straight up. No Bhoppering.#RocketRacing)
Anyway. Back to the point. And if things get frustrating and I'm not gonna pretend they don't. It just needs a place to go while you figure out who you're becoming in this. It doesn't need an audience and it sure doesn't belong on then drive home. I started gardening(grew a pineapple) and kinda writing. I started riding my bike again, early mornings along the LA river. None of it was planned. My wife needed quiet and I needed somewhere to put my energy so she didn't have to feel bad or worry about me. That's the whole trade. Find your thing. Doesn't have to make sense to anybody else and it doesn't have to look good either. It just has to get you out of the house or off the couch or out of your own head long enough for her to enjoy the silence.
The silence stopped being a problem the moment I stopped treating it like one.
"The forest stays alive because it lets dead things fall."