Over time, I became irritated with him-exasperated by his impatience, grumpiness, lethargy. Moreover, I became irritated with myself, annoyed by the false notes in my voice as I tried to engage Felipe in whatever curiosity I’d dragged him to this time. (Oh, darling-look! They’re selling rats for food! Oh, darling-look! The mommy elephant is washing her baby! Oh, darling-look! This hotel room has such an interesting view of the slaughterhouse!) Meanwhile, Felipe would head off to the bathroom and come back fuming about the filth and stink of the place-whatever place we happened to be in-while simultaneously complaining that the air pollution was making his throat sting and the traffic was giving him a headache.
His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and-one really awful night-to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadn’t looked carefully at the travel-sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottle of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in.
All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country. We shared the bus with no small amount of livestock, and our seats were harder than Quaker meetinghouse pews. There was no air-conditioning, of course, and the windows were sealed shut. I can’t rightly say that the heat was unbearable, because obviously we bore it, but I will say that it was very, very hot. I couldn’t rouse Felipe’s interest in the upcoming archaeological site, but I also couldn’t get a rise out of him about the conditions of our bus ride-and that really was notable, given that this was probably the most perilous public transportation experience I’d ever endured. The driver operated his ancient vehicle with a manic aggression, several times almost dumping us over some fairly impressive cliffs. But Felipe did not react to any of this, nor did he react to any of our near collisions with oncoming traffic. He just went numb. He shut his eyes in weariness and stopped speaking altogether. He seemed resigned to death. Or perhaps he was merely longing for it.
After several more such life-threatening hours, our bus suddenly rounded a curve and came upon the site of a big road accident: Two buses not at all unlike ours had just crashed head-on. There seemed to be no injuries, but the vehicles were a twisted-up pile of smoking metal. As we slowed to pass, I grabbed Felipe’s arm and said, “Look, darling! There’s been a collision between two buses!”
Without even opening his eyes, he replied sarcastically, “How on earth could that possibly have happened?”
Suddenly I was shot through with anger.
“What is it that you want?” I demanded.
He didn’t answer, which only made me angrier, so I pushed on: “I’m just trying to make the best out of this situation, okay? If you have any better ideas or any better plans-please, by all means, offer some. And I really hope you can think of something that will make you happy, because I honestly can’t take your misery anymore, I really can’t.”
Now his eyes flew open. “I just want a coffeepot,” he said with unexpected passion.
“What do you mean, a coffeepot?”
“I just want to be home, living with you in one place safely together. I want routine. I want a coffeepot of our own. I want to be able to wake up at the same time every morning and make breakfast for us, in our own house, with our own coffeepot.”
In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?
“We can’t have any of that stuff right now,” I said.
“My God, Liz-you think I don’t know that?”
“You think I don’t want those things, too?” I shot back.
His voice rose: “You think I’m not aware that you want those things? You think I haven’t seen you reading real estate ads online? You think I can’t tell you’re homesick? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that I cannot provide you with a home right now, that you’re stuck in all these beat-up hotel rooms on the other side of the world because of me? Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for me, that I can’t afford to offer you a better life right now? Do you have any idea how fucking helpless that makes me feel? As a man?”
I forget sometimes.
I have to say this, because I think it’s such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.
I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend’s face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he “wasn’t there for her”-but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. “Okay,” he admitted, “so maybe I wasn’t there for her emotionally, but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn’t that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would’ve picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety-and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn’t there for her?”
I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is no nuclear holocaust. Most days, unfortunately, the only thing his wife had really needed was a little more attention.
Similarly, the only thing I needed from Felipe at that moment was for him to calm down, to be nicer, to show me and everyone else around us a little more patience, a little more emotional generosity. I didn’t need provision or protection from him. I didn’t need his manly pride; it wasn’t serving for anything here. I just needed him to relax into the situation as it was. Yes, of course, it would have been much nicer to be back home, near my family, living in a real house-but our rootlessness right now didn’t bother me nearly as much as his moodiness.
Trying to defuse the tension, I touched Felipe’s leg and said, “I can see that this situation is really frustrating for you.”
I had learned that trick from a book called Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America’s Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman-two (happily married) researchers from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle who have received a lot of attention lately for their claim that they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will still be married in five years merely by studying a fifteen-minute transcript of typical conversation between the husband and the wife. (For this reason, I imagine that John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman make terrifying dinner guests.) Whatever the breadth of their powers may be, the Gottmans do offer some practical strategies for resolving marital disputes, trying to save couples from what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used-repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared-is something the Gottmans call “Turning Toward Your Partner.” It’s supposed to defuse arguments.