I might be an awful cynic, but I’ve found that the small space between two people as they lay next to one another can become an emotional minefield. I’ll take a small chapter out of my past as an example. I was in love. Not the warm and fuzzy kind, but the sort where there are either fireworks in the sky or bombs dropping on the ground. It was a violent sort of feeling, and the mellow person that I had known myself to be was somewhat lost in the wake of that romance. He had been married before, and his divorce and separation were only a year old. His hurt and anger always simmered just below the surface and he often refused to speak his ex-wife’s name, referring to her simply as “what’s her face.” Great, right? He hated her, wanted nothing to do with her, so I should have been an obvious shoe-in. But I really didn’t see it that way. The more we dated, the more insecure I became—not of his affection for her, but of his feelings. It didn’t matter that they were all negative.
So, I commenced hostilities. He had just returned from his first parent/teacher conference as a fully divorced man. I could see his tension and his grief; but instead of feeling sympathetic, I felt threatened. We lay next to each other, faces close, tenderness palpable, and I shot my first little missile under the cover of caring inquisitiveness. I asked about his night, hiding my fear and that strange twisted urge to know something that would ultimately hurt me. His previous life, or more importantly, his previous wife, was like a sore in my mouth that I couldn’t stop picking.
It didn’t take much to turn a little shot here and there into a full-on invasion. He needed to talk; I needed to know. I remember one exact phrase, “Her hands were so cold and white…like marble. She’s just so cold.” Do you know what my little mind took from all that? I didn’t congratulate myself on being a wildcat in bed, or an affectionate friend and partner. My first thought was “He’s never noticed my hands.” Writing those words now, I see how much I ached to be the center of his universe, but his grief alone would have kept that from being a possibility for a very long time. The details of “me” were lost on him. I told myself that what I really wanted was just to know, so that I might extricate myself from a situation that would never work. After that, my subtlety was lost, and the little attacks made under the guise of curiosity were thrown to the wind. Pillow talk became a pillow fight, a strange defense mechanism to protect myself from an eventuality that terrified me—a life with a man who couldn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that we eventually broke up. He was entirely too raw to truly enter a new relationship with a healthy mindset, and I was the loony who used our most intimate conversations to dredge up his past. I coaxed complete honesty, hoping against hope that he would someday say what I wanted hear, whatever that was, and that the specter of his ex-wife would finally be laid to rest. My defense mechanism became a battering ram that smashed through the walls that protected us from our own dysfunctions.
Soon my little bedtime barrages exposed tales of excessive promiscuity, homosexual forays, secret wishes for deviance within our own relationship, and an even deeper well of hatred for his ex. I could try every ambush in the book, but I wasn’t going to scare up a confession that felt good. I only grew more knowledgeable of all the painful darkness in his heart. And, because I had used that intimate space and his trust to serve my own competitive purposes, his confessions were not healing for him—they were just ammunition for me. It’s a horrible, ugly way to be, but it might be gratifying to know that I suffered painfully for my sins.
