My husband David is not a talker.
I knew this about him when I married him. I told myself I was okay with it. I am a words person. I write for a living.
I say I love you the way some people breathe, automatically, constantly, without thinking. And David, bless him, will look at me from across the room and smile in this quiet way that I spent the first two years of our marriage completely misreading.
I thought quiet meant distant. I thought distance meant something was wrong. I would lie awake next to this man who loved me with everything he had and convince myself I was alone in this relationship.
I was not alone. I was just with someone who spoke a different language.
And the day I finally understood that changed everything.
Here is what I have learned about the person sleeping next to you. The one across the dinner table. The one who sometimes goes quiet in the middle of a conversation and you have no idea where they went.
They are not empty. They are full. So full that sometimes the feelings have no exit.
David once told me, after four years of marriage, that the morning I had a really brutal week at work and he just drew me a bath without saying a word, he had actually been rehearsing a whole speech in his head.
- About how much he admired me.
- About how watching me push through hard things made him love me in a way he had no vocabulary for.
He drew the bath because the words failed him. He stood in that bathroom running the water and thought, maybe she will feel this instead.
I never knew. I thanked him for the bath and went to bed.
We laughed about it when he told me. But honestly, I also wanted to cry. Because how many of those moments had I missed? How many times had he been saying something enormous and I was waiting for words that were never going to come?
The truth about the person you love is this. They are probably terrible at saying the thing that matters most right when it matters most. Not because they do not feel it. But because the feeling is so big that language feels cheap by comparison.
My friend Diane went through a rough patch with her partner last year. Six months of tension, of half finished conversations, of going to bed on opposite sides of a silence neither of them knew how to break. She told me she felt completely unloved. Invisible. Like she was sharing a home with a stranger.
And then one evening she found a note in her coat pocket. Just a folded piece of paper. Her partner had written, and I am paraphrasing because these were their private words, something about how every morning he wakes up and his first thought is her. That he knows he has not been easy to reach. That he is trying. That he does not know how to open the door from the inside but he is standing right behind it.
Diane called me crying. She said Patricia, he has been here the whole time. I just could not see him.
That note did not fix everything overnight. But it opened something. And they have been finding their way back to each other ever since.
I think we forget sometimes that the people who love us are also figuring this out as they go. Nobody handed us a manual.
Nobody sat us down and said, here is how you love someone through the hard seasons. Here is how you say I am scared without sounding weak. Here is how you tell someone they are your whole world without feeling ridiculous about it.
We are all just doing our best with the tools we were given and some of us were given very few tools when it comes to expressing love out loud.
So when your partner goes quiet, before you decide it means something is wrong, consider that they might be standing behind that door Diane’s partner wrote about. Present. Trying. Just waiting for a way in.
Ask them softer questions. Not what is wrong, because that immediately puts someone on the defence. Try, what are you thinking about? Or even just, hey, I am here. Sometimes the right question is not a question at all. Sometimes it is just sitting close enough that they know the door is open.
And if you are the quiet one reading this, the one who feels things deeply but loses the words every single time, I want you to know something.
The people who love you are not asking you to become someone else. They just want to know you are in there.
- A text.
- A note.
- A hand on their back in the middle of the night.
It does not have to be a speech.
Love does not always need a microphone. Sometimes it just needs to be felt.
If this felt like something your partner needed to hear, send it to them. No explanation needed. They will understand.
Patricia Monroe