What did you believe as a child that turned out not to be true?
Date: 13 October 2026
That being male made me evil. And wrong. Any expression of independence or rebellion was labelled chauvinism.
“You and those goddamn balls of yours” was commonly heard in our home. There was no father in it.
I had no idea what it meant to be a good man.
“Men were oppressors, maintainers of a patriarchy built on fear,” my mother recited to me from something considerably more radical than Gloria Steinem.
My sexuality was dissected and despised. Puberty was hard. I did more than think about killing myself. I planned.
When did you begin to suspect otherwise?
Date: 13 October 2026
At the end of my first marriage.
“Sideburns are too masculine,” I proclaimed. Nuala rolled her eyes, glanced at her friend and said, “See what I have to deal with?”
The mild contempt stung. I set out to become a man’s-man-woman’s-man.
What pattern have you repeated in relationships that you would like to break?
Date: 14 March 2026
Riding the pity train.
When Nuala cheated with someone from Reuters, where she’d just started, I went full drama. I fell onto our bedroom floor in a heap while she sat on the bed, still in her work clothes.
“Why?” I asked from the floor.
“Because you’re always like this.” She sighed. “Melodramatic.”
I sobbed.
“You see?”
I could not give her what she wanted. It was fire. I gave her ash. I only got more pathetic; she got more distant, more professional, more gone. The marriage didn’t end because of whoever-it-was from Reuters. It ended because of my weakness. I mistook pity for intimacy.
Six years after the wedding, our marriage counselor asked us to think back to what had been good between us. I had loads. She had nothing.
“There must be something you recall fondly,” I said, my voice fraying. “The wedding. India. The—”
“I remember being young,” she cut in, her voice utterly flat. “I remember feeling inexperienced, overwhelmed.”
The counselor shifted in her chair. I looked at Nuala, and saw someone I’d never actually met. Or someone I had simply never tried to see.
“Did you ever love me?” It came out frail.
I looked at the ceiling. She left it too long.
“I loved the person I thought you were.”
Which was worse than a no. It meant she’d loved an expectation.
“Would you like to have another session?” the counselor asked.
“No.” Nuala reached for her coat.
When did you first notice the shape of it?
Date: 14 March 2026
Nuala started a new job in London Town; she loved to call it that. Her new toy, her flip phone, came with the gig. She was not playing Snake.
I noticed the affair too late. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. I’d stand at the front window for hours, scanning the street for her. I kept vigil at the window until dawn, flicking the curtains. She was seeing someone from her office. She was thumbing through her flip phone.
“Someone from the office?”
“Yes.”
And that was all I got. I’d never met anyone she worked with. She kept that world to herself. Her new life of drinks after work, coming home late, and constrained without actors.
“Lots of omissions,” I told myself.
“Just colleagues from work,” she’d say. “You don’t know them.”
I pictured him, and it made my blood boil. Oxbridge, soon to get a foreign correspondent gig, the kind of “bloke” who could talk about Kosovo over a glass of wine without welling up.
And yet, somehow, I was in the wrong. She had lines for it. “Stop controlling me.” “You’re being insecure.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “You’re needy.”
After one fight she said it with her back to me in bed. “Suffocating.” Cruelty or truth, I wondered.
Years after we split, she said it again across a restaurant table: “I couldn’t breathe, you suffocated me.”
Twenty years later, my second wife, the mother of my son, reached for the same word. She never met Nuala. They had nothing in common except me. I’d just checked whether her phone had gone with her behind the bathroom door.
“Suffocating.”
That was when I finally saw the shape. The only common factor in both marriages was me. Two wives, one word. And two phones.
List them. The drawer, the bottle, the photographs, the thing on the high shelf. Say who they belonged to if you know.
At my grandmother’s house on South Padre Island, everything she gave to her younger lover was taboo to touch: his cologne, watches, shaving cream, office, desk, VHS, stetson, portrait and cars. Everything that was his was forbidden. Nothing of hers was forbidden to touch, and in effect it all belonged to her.
He shall remain Nameless. Not because we detested him, which we did, but because naming him would make him recognizable. We never asked about the extent of their relationship. He would leave his toiletries in my grandmother’s bathroom. We were never allowed to touch them. My brother loved to apply generous amounts of his expensive shaving foam. One day he was forced to use soap to shave.
“No one touches my shaving cream, claro?!”
We hated him for making such a big deal out of it.
Not long afterwards my brother happily perfumed himself with an oversized bottle of lover boy’s cologne, which was shaped like the chiseled torso of a man. My contribution to the rebellion was to move the bookmark of my grandmother’s romance novel and see if she noticed. She never did.
“I behoove you to stay out of my office!”
One day when the house was empty, I sat at his desk and searched for contraband. His portrait in a giant stetson kept watch on the room. When he sat at his desk he would admire himself.
At the back of a drawer I found a VHS of Scarface. No contraband. He was a man who wanted to be Tony Montana, not one who was.
The stetson never gathered dust on the high shelf in his closet; the maid made sure of that. It was felt, smooth and sensitive to the elements, a hat that had never been out in any. My grandfather’s hat had been out in all of them. His father gave it to him, and the Dust Bowl scoured it matte. It smelled of my grandfather. Prairie and Competence. It protected his head on the ranch and at the bank, and at both places it hung from a nail driven into a wooden beam.
Nameless’s vintage Porsche 911 would leak oil in my grandmother’s garage, next to his 1976 red-striped Gran Torino. He preferred to drive a Lincoln. All of them were “noli me tangere.” It means “no touchey.” Grandmother liked to teach us good words.
We sneered at him. We did not think he belonged in Grandfather’s chair. Nor did we believe he belonged in Grandmother’s house, on the bayside of South Padre Island, amidst the tasteful decor. His plastic-covered couches were endless conversational fodder.
After Grandfather died and before Nameless, my brother and I found, in a dusty drawer at Grandfather’s ranch in Oklahoma, a World War II canteen and a compass from his Marine Raider days in the Pacific. We claimed his old leather chair too. We marched across the ranch on 100-degree summer days with the compass that pointed nowhere in particular.
I sneer less now, but I still resent him. He was excellent at helping her spend money, and she became penniless. I could have used some of that money to go to university.
“I never regretted a moment with him!” she told me shortly before she died.
He kept the cars, the portrait, the stetson, and the watches. She retired to Mexico on her Social Security checks. The chair went to South Padre Island. If I could sit in it, I would wear it smooth.
My son’s mother gave me the best thing I’ve ever had, and that’s him. Then she betrayed me, and we went from making love to breaking it. She told me I was being dramatic, that I was playing the victim. I hated her for that. What I hated more was that she wasn’t wrong. She never really said sorry, and honestly I was in too much pain to have taken it from her anyway. What she regretted wasn’t what she’d done. It was getting caught.
What have you done with the waiting?
Date: 2 April 2026
I keep telling myself that one of these days I’ll accept the apology I never got. Not for her. For me. I’ve practiced accepting it a lot more times than she ever practiced giving it. I poke at the pain the way you can’t leave a canker sore alone with your tongue. It hurts a little, it’s familiar, and I need it. I bite it until my eyes water, and the pain lingers and swells. And it won’t go away until I stop hurting myself.
What pattern have you repeated in relationships that you would like to break?
Date: 14 March 2026
Riding the pity train.
When Nuala cheated with someone from Reuters, where she’d just started, I went full drama. I fell onto our bedroom floor in a heap while she sat on the bed, still in her work clothes. She was thumbing through her flip phone.
“Someone from the office?”
“Yes.”
And that was all I got. I’d never met anyone she worked with. She kept that world to herself. Her new life of drinks after work, coming home late, and constrained without actors.
“Lots of omissions,” I told myself.
“Just colleagues from work,” she’d say. “You don’t know them.”
I pictured him, and it made my blood boil. Oxbridge, soon to get a foreign correspondent gig, the kind of “bloke” who could talk about Kosovo over a glass of wine without welling up.
“Why?” I asked from the floor.
“Because you’re always like this.” She sighed. “Melodramatic.”
I sobbed.
“You see?”
I could not give her what she wanted. It was fire. I gave her ash. The marriage didn’t end because of whoever-it-was from Reuters. It ended because of my weakness. I mistook pity for intimacy.
I’d stand at the front window for hours, scanning the street for her. I only got more pathetic; she got more distant, more professional, more gone.
Six years after the wedding, our marriage counselor asked us to think back to what had been good between us. I had loads. She had nothing.
“There must be something you recall fondly,” I said, my voice fraying. “The wedding. India. The—”
“I remember being young,” she cut in, her voice utterly flat. “I remember feeling inexperienced, overwhelmed.”
The counselor shifted in her chair. I looked at Nuala, and saw someone I’d never actually met. Or someone I had simply never tried to see.
“Did you ever love me?” It came out frail.
I looked at the ceiling. She left it too long.
“I loved the person I thought you were.”
Which was worse than a no. It meant she’d loved an expectation.
“Would you like to have another session?” the counselor asked.
“No.” Nuala reached for her coat.
When did you first notice the shape of it?
Date: 14 March 2026
Nuala started a new job in London Town; she loved to call it that. Her new toy, her flip phone, came with the gig. She was not playing Snake.
I noticed the affair too late. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. I kept vigil at the window until dawn, flicking the curtains. She was seeing someone from her office. And yet, somehow, I was in the wrong. She had lines for it. “Stop controlling me.” “You’re being insecure.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “You’re needy.”
After one fight she said it with her back to me in bed. “Suffocating.” Cruelty or truth, I wondered.
Years after we split, she said it again across a restaurant table: “I couldn’t breathe, you suffocated me.”
Twenty years later, my second wife, the mother of my son, reached for the same word. She never met Nuala. They had nothing in common except me. I’d just checked whether her phone had gone with her behind the bathroom door.
“Suffocating.”
That was when I finally saw the shape. The only common factor in both marriages was me. Two wives, one word. And two phones.
