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Our friend Richard has gone to Italy. We dropped him at the airport. We, and his mom, hugged him good-bye and sent him on his way. It’s going to be really weird to not have him around for a few months. I don’t think Jonathon, or I, realized how much we were going to miss him until the moment came to let him go off, off, and away.
Jonathon is the first of his close male friends to marry, and as often happens, that means that the ones that can make the adjustment to his being married, hang around a lot. The ones that still act as if he can drop everything and go off to a concert on a school night, or that being married means you don’t still date your wife, well, those friends we’ve had to ‘talk’ to. But Richard wasn’t one of them. Richard got it. He moved into our lives and quickly became as a good a friend to me, as he was to Jonathon. That’s rare. I wish him well, but we miss him. I don’t think it will really sink in until a couple of weeks are passed and he hasn’t come over for dinner, or gone to a movie with us, or helped us explain Trinity’s homework to her. There are nights when Richard, or Jonathon did dinner, I was still up writing, and whichever of one of them wasn’t cooking helped Trinity with her homework. I think almost every couple I know that has school age children, and has both adults working outside the house, needs like a third adult some nights. We all seem so busy lately. I know families where the parents are so busy taking the kids from one event to another in the evening that they never really see eachother. The kids barely have time for homework. You know, I really don’t believe that the kids are better off for being in soccer, field hockey, dance, and scouts, oh, and don’t forget basketball, or baseball, or football, or sometimes almost all of it per child. That’s insane. No adult would want that schedule. Sometimes I think we keep ourselves busy so we don’t have time to decide whether we’re really happy, or just spinning our wheels. We seem afraid of silence, and good conversation.
I add the silence for all you men out there, because I’ll tell you what most men value more than good conversation. They value the ability to be in a room with people they care about, and are so comfortable with, that they don’t have to talk. Jonathon and I do that some nights, either when Trinity is with her father, or after she’s gone to bed. We sit in the livingroom and read, or just sit in companionable silence. One of our male friends, who is actually the husband of one of my best girlfriends, said a very profound thing once. His saying it was what gave me the clue to how much men value silence. My girlfriend and I were talking, of course, about how nice it was to get together with good friends, and talk. Her husband said, “Or not have to talk.” I asked Jonathon about it later, and he confirmed that sometimes the highest compliment for a man is that he wants to sit with you in total silence, and feels comfortable doing it.
I know, I know, hard for most women. It’s only this year that I realized just how much of our communicating is hardwired. Literally, as I’ve tried to cultivate silence, I find myself having to fight the urge to fill the silence. Fight the urge to talk. Sometimes I can’t help myself, but more and more, I’m finding that the handful of friends that I can not only talk to, but also sit in silence with, are becoming more and more valued.
I’d had this idea before a saw a show called, DEFENDING THE CAVEMAN, it is traveling the country now. I urge any couple to see it. It talks, hilariously, about many of the differences between men and women. One part of the show talks about how women always want men to talk to them, and how men just don’t get it. We’ve been forcing men to talk to us for decades, let’s try to give them companionable silence sometimes. Not angry silence, not why won’t you talk to me silence, but genuine happy to be in the same room with you silence. Try it, I know that Jonathon and I have found it lovely.
It is an interesting experience to be in a room with three adults, and having all of us reading, or making notes, in silence, but all of us being terribly content with that silence. Of the many things I learned from Joanthon’s and Richard’s friendship, that is one of the lessons I value most; the joy of shared silence. The other thing that I had to learn just to survive around Richard was being better at clever repartee. He is the master of the intelligent double entendre. Even our friend Greg has gotten better at it, out of sheer self-defense.
It’s strange, I grew up in a house with no men. But married to Jonathon, we seem to have so many single male friends, that I’ve gotten sort of a crash course in the culture of maleness. And any woman who reads this and thinks, men, they have no culture . . . well, that woman just hasn’t taken the time to pay attention to the men in her life.
It works both ways, of course, but I get tired of hearing women male bash, and say things that if a man said the exact same thing about a woman, they’d be painted as the blackest of villains. I strike a blow here for true sexual equality. Let us visit eachother’s best qualities, not our worst.
Try a little silence. It may feel better than you think.