Just listen.
Kristen and I were sitting out on our patio, enjoying a midsummer evening with a glass of wine and a cozy little fire. The leaves of our young maple trees whispered faintly overhead and broke up the bright moonlight, which glistened off our patio furniture and cast shadows from the tall wooden swing set in the corner of our lawn. While warming her toes near the fire, Kristen told me that she’d heard about a research study that was meant to determine how early in life humans can exhibit empathy.
“Apparently the researchers gathered all these infants together to see how they’d react when they heard the sound of a baby crying, and they found that if one infant cried, then most of the other infants would cry in response,” she said.
I was mesmerized by the glowing embers beneath the flames in our fire pit, which made the surrounding brick come alive in a delicate, jittery light. “And?”
“Well, they think it’s proof that humans can empathize when they’re just a few weeks old. Isn’t that amazing?”
I said that it was, and then I made the story about me. “I wonder if I would have cried.”
We unanimously agreed that if another baby had cried, then I most certainly would have cried, too, but only because the little son of a bitch would have interrupted my sleep. What can I say? I’m just not as empathic as, well, most of the world’s population. Not that it’s my fault, of course.
First of all—let’s face it—I’m a guy. That’s strike one. To make matters worse, I’m a guy with Asperger syndrome. If empathy were currency, men with Asperger syndrome would starve. The fact that I’m also a husband basically means that if you ever want to get your feelings noticed, you pretty much have to grab me by the cheeks and say very slowly: “I. Need. You. To. Listen. To. Me.” Even then, I might misinterpret your point: Woo hoo! She’s hitting me up for sex!
With our communication skills on the mend, Kristen and I had begun talking more frequently about empathy, and more specifically my apparent deficiency in it. The topic was bound to come up; reduced empathic ability was a frustrating reality of my disorder, and by extension, our marriage. I understood that one of the major bullet points in any list of symptoms associated with autism spectrum conditions was a problematic deficiency in empathy in relation to neurotypicals. But in the first few months after my diagnosis, I wasn’t certain that I had that particular symptom. I feel stuff, I thought.
Kristen thought differently. She was painfully aware of my deficit, having been something of a victim of my apparent insensitivity (read: cluelessness) for years. With my diagnosis, she gained a new perspective that allowed her to see that I may have been clinically self-centered, outrageously self-centered, but not willfully self-centered. She tried sharing this perspective with me, explaining that I hadn’t been programmed for empathic ability and never would be. “And that’s fine,” she’d add. Is it? I’d wonder. Sounds like empathy is a pretty big deal, actually.
She began taking time to explain why certain social situations were challenging for me. Things like engaging with people in socially appropriate ways: “I think your brother really wanted to see you the other night, Dave. It’s not your fault, but you missed the cues.” This after my brother had offered—out of the blue—to buy me dinner one evening, and although we almost never go out together, I’d declined, saying, “I do love free food. But it’s Butter Noodles Saturday, so I’m going to pass.” My response had seemed perfectly acceptable to me, but to Kristen and my brother it was clear that I hadn’t interpreted his emotional intent: to spend time together.
As empathy became the focus of Kristen’s and my discussions, I became increasingly confused about whether or not I could empathize, and if so, how well. I couldn’t begin to imagine how a person might quantify a deficit in empathy. A deficit in teeth or eyebrows would be pretty easy to assess, but what constitutes a lack of empathy?
“What if I give a shit, but just barely?” I once asked Kristen. “Would that count? What if I can determine what someone else is feeling, but I can’t actually feel it myself? Or what if I could sense your sadness but never offered you any comfort? In that case, would empathy even matter? How much is ‘I’m sorry’ going to buy you, really? If I’m willing to be compassionate on demand, could that count for something?”
Kristen waited until I finished, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “Empathy is like talent, Dave. We’re born with some amount of it, so we all function at different levels. Also, it’s not a matter of ‘I’m better’ or ‘you’re worse.’ We’re just different.”
Still, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. I understood that empathy was a vital resource for successful social interactions, that it prevented one person from offending another and even drew people together, allowing them to bond in ways that are exclusive to the human experience. I felt like I was missing out on part of that experience. And looking back, I was. Engaging the social world without empathy is like going to the mall without any money or pants on; it can be done, but you’re bound to have problems.
I didn’t want to think of myself as being devoid of feeling, so I initially rejected the idea that I lacked empathy. I thought of my reactions to situations captured in films, television, and literature. I could recognize when a character offended someone important, for instance, and I would become anxious the moment he or she realized it. I understood what it meant whenever the medical director softened his eyes in a dramatic tough-love speech. I had shed tears during Folgers coffee commercials. (I didn’t bother to consider the fact that had the actor in the Folgers commercial pulled me aside after the shoot and told me he had only one day left to live, I would have immediately asked him if he knew how many days I had left.)
I thought of my favorite childhood teddy bear. How I had discovered him one afternoon lying facedown on my bedroom floor and had clutched him to my chest and cried apologetically because I thought he seemed lonely. But then I thought of the countless times I’d seen my classmates burst into tears in the classroom or on the playground, and I realized that in those moments I always reacted the same way I did when I watched them take a bite out of a sandwich. So, does the teddy bear count? I wondered.
I also tried to convince myself that my compassion for (and understanding of) cattle counted as empathy. Growing up, we raised red Angus cattle and showed them every summer at the Illinois state and county fairs, and at my dad’s comical, almost maniacal insistence, I spent a lot of time around the herd. “We’re not going to half-ass this,” he’d say whenever I complained. “Now get out there and brush your steer. And when you’re done with that, you can wash him and brush him again.” His point was that if you’re going to do something, then you need to do it right. He also knew that an animal’s trust is garnered over time, so I learned how to interact with our cattle, hour by hour, as the summers unfolded. Amid dusty beams of sunlight streaming in through the cracks and knotholes in the siding of the barn, I’d watch them watching me while they ate—staring with awe into the masticating faces of unimpressed cattle was an activity I found easy to focus on. Then the summer would end, and I’d be forced to sell my steer at the annual livestock auction.
I’ve attended funerals for loved ones where the greatest discomfort I experienced came from the suit I had to wear. But each summer, after loading my steer onto the slaughter truck, I’d suffer crying jags that would pop up randomly for days. I’d lie awake nights, thinking about him—his huge, calm, trusting eyes; his ears falling forward, relaxed; the sound of his breathing; how he just ate and looked around, totally comfortable in my presence. There was never a question in my mind as to how my steer felt in those moments I spent with him: We have a weird relationship here, but it works. Can you do something about these flies?
I was no expert, but to me these examples constituted some empathic ability, which made things rather confusing for me. Worse, nobody could agree on what empathy amounted to. Kristen had her definition, which differed from the one in the dictionary, which contradicted my friends’ theories. And of course, none of those definitions could please the millions of contrarian bloggers I found when I searched for the term online—faceless people with names like CaptainHamwhistle who stay up nights rethinking their avatars and who themselves couldn’t define the concept yet insisted that any mainstream definition was not to be trusted.
With no clear definition of empathy, and no way of quantifying how much of it I had or didn’t have, I resorted to actual research to get to the bottom of things. I sequestered myself in Kristen’s office one evening while she was watching a movie—some tearjerker I had no business getting myself involved in. Beaches, I think it was. My first Internet search included the keywords empathy, Asperger, and syndrome, and the results were rather useless—confusing wiki threads, links to videos of purportedly clairvoyant house cats, that sort of thing. Then I added the word measuring to my search parameters, and within minutes I had all the answers I needed.
There were many results to choose from, but I started with an article titled “The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome,” which had been written by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. (Leave it to renowned experts and leading researchers to really know what they’re talking about. No offense, CaptainHamwhistle.)
In the article, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright spelled out in no uncertain terms—and I’m paraphrasing here—that my wife had been right all along. I do in fact have a measurable deficiency in empathic ability. My Empathy Quotient? Using Baron-Cohen’s method, I earned a meager fifteen points out of a possible eighty. That’s 19 percent. Talk about just barely giving a shit. The study’s control group—neurotypicals—averaged in the forties. (Interestingly, a second study revealed that among the general population, women scored significantly higher than men. A point that will come as no surprise to women.)
According to Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, empathy is “the drive or ability to attribute mental states to another person/animal, and entails an appropriate affective response in the observer to the other person’s mental state.” Hmm. I called up the stairs to Kristen, asking her what affective meant.
“Affective what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just affective.”
“Relating to an emotional state,” she called.
Oh. Okay, this makes sense. I wrote the definition down in my notebook. So this is what I’m lacking!
Baron-Cohen’s first article inspired me to read more. In all the subsequent searches I made sure to include his name, and by the end of the evening I had a stack of clinical papers on the subject. I had empirical data rather than conjecture, which meant that I finally had answers.
What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to feel some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something else that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do.
Empathy involves both processes, and while they operate independently of one another, there is some overlap. A graphical representation of empathy might involve a Venn diagram—two circles, one for the affective component and one for the cognitive, slightly overlapping, with me standing well outside of both circles talking incessantly about the weather during a funeral.
In people with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum conditions, these mechanisms of understanding are much less reliable and productive than in neurotypicals. Those of us living within the parameters of an autism spectrum condition simply can’t engage the empathic processes that allow for social reasoning and emotional awareness. Furthermore, we have difficulty separating ourselves from our own perspectives (the word autism comes from the Greek word autos, meaning “self”), so we can’t easily understand or even access the perspectives and feelings of others.
This explains why I sat in bird poo in junior high school, to the profound amusement of popular kids. Had I access to the appropriate cognitive resources, I might have been able to recognize the motivations of the douchebags who had insisted that I sit with them, “in that spot, right there.” I thought they actually wanted me to join them, even though they couldn’t remember my name or keep themselves from laughing.
Reduced empathic ability also partially accounts for my gross misinterpretation of social exchanges. I wrongly estimate the intentions that underlie the interaction, and in so doing, I make a fool of myself. Kristen and I might meet a couple at a party, and if I feel any sort of connection with them, I’ll pull Kristen aside and start hounding her: “We need to become close friends with these people as soon as possible. Invite them over this weekend. They like us, it’s obvious. He mentioned they have a boat—that was an invitation for us to join them on it, right?”
“They were just talking to us the way people do at parties,” Kristen will say, looking at me skeptically. “I think they might be drunk.”
On the way home, we might argue about it. I will insist that Kristen just blew the friendship opportunity of a lifetime, and she will maintain her position that it’s creepy to tell strangers that you’d like to become close friends with them, adding, “And you should never say ‘as soon as possible.’”
Whenever I find myself sitting in bird poo or demanding close relationships from complete strangers, I can chalk it up to God-given faulty cognitive processes. To me, this is great news. I don’t have to be embarrassed anymore about my social cluelessness. I can’t be expected to predict the intentions of others and assume their perspectives any more than I can be expected to rebuild a carburetor or sit down at a piano to knock out a Rachmaninoff concerto; I wasn’t born with that particular talent.
The not-so-great news is that my affective (emotional) responses are also reduced, a phenomenon that severely undermines my abilities as a husband. Embarrassing myself at a cocktail party is one thing. Not being able to recognize when Kristen needs my support is something else entirely.
After Emily was born, Kristen struggled with postpartum depression. We didn’t recognize it at first. Something wasn’t right, she wasn’t herself, but we assumed that her moods and exhaustion were due only to the surprising demands of being a first-time mom.
Kristen had dreamed of having children since she was herself a child and had always thought that she would love motherhood as much as she would love her babies. “I know that being a mom will be demanding,” she told me once. “But I don’t think it will change me much. I’ll still have my life, and our baby will be part of it.” She envisioned long walks through the neighborhood with Emily. She envisioned herself mastering the endlessly repeating three-hour cycle of playing, feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing. Most of all, she envisioned a full parenting partnership, in which I’d help whenever I was home—morning, nighttime, and weekends. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she told me, which she did after Emily was born.
At first, the newness of parenthood made it seem as though everything was going according to our expectations. We’ll be up all day and all night for a few weeks, but then we’ll hit our stride and our lives will go back to normal, plus one baby. Kristen took a few months off from work to focus all of her attention on Emily, knowing that it would be hard to juggle the contradicting demands of an infant and a career. She was determined to own motherhood. “We’re still in that tough transition,” Kristen would tell me, trying to console Emily at four A.M. “Pretty soon, we’ll find our routine. I hope.”
But things didn’t go as we had planned. There were complications with breast-feeding. Emily wasn’t gaining weight; she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t play. She was born in December, when it was far too cold to go for walks outdoors. While I was at work, Kristen would sit on the floor with Emily in the dark—all the lights off, all the shades closed—and cry. She’d think about her friends, all of whom had made motherhood look so easy with their own babies. “Mary had no problem breast-feeding,” she’d tell me. “Jenny said that these first few months had been her favorite. Why can’t I get the hang of this?” I didn’t have any answers, but still I offered solutions, none of which she wanted to hear: “Talk to a lactation consultant about the feeding issues.” “Establish a routine and stick to it.” Eventually, she stopped talking altogether.
While Kristen struggled, I watched from the sidelines, unaware that she needed help. I excused myself from the nighttime and morning responsibilities, as the interruptions to my daily schedule became too much for me to handle. We didn’t know this was because of a developmental disorder; I just looked incredibly selfish. I contributed, but not fully. I’d return from work, and Kristen would go upstairs to sleep for a few hours while I’d carry Emily from room to room, gently bouncing her as I walked, trying to keep her from crying. But eventually eleven o’clock would roll around and I’d go to bed, and Kristen would be awake the rest of the night with her. The next morning, I would wake up and leave for work, while Kristen stared down the barrel of another day alone.
To my surprise, I grew increasingly disappointed in her: She wanted to have children. Why is she miserable all the time? What’s her problem? I also resented what I had come to recognize as our failing marriage. I’d expected our marriage to be happy, fulfilling, overflowing with constant affection. My wife was supposed to be able to handle things like motherhood with aplomb. Kristen loved me, and she loved Emily, but that wasn’t enough for me. In my version of a happy marriage, my wife would also love the difficulties of being my wife and being a mom. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to earn the happiness, the fulfillment, the affection. Nor had it occurred to me that she might have her own perspective on marriage and motherhood.
Spring finally arrived, and Kristen started taking Emily out for walks. The sunshine illuminated something important for her—it wasn’t normal to sit in the dark and cry all day. She brought this up one afternoon while we were out for a walk together with Emily. “That’s all I do,” she said. “I sing to her, I play with her, and I cry. I never feel like getting dressed, I never feel like doing anything. Ever.” We walked a few blocks in silence before I said that it seemed she hadn’t been herself in months. Sobbing, she admitted that she felt the same way. We had been living with her symptoms but had misidentified their source. It was not unlike the discovery that I was an undiagnosed Aspie.
Kristen eventually sought treatment and started taking medication for her depression, and she bounced back almost immediately. It was a relief to see her come back so quickly. It was a relief to see her come back, period. She felt better, but her medication couldn’t alleviate her resentment toward me for not displaying even a shred of empathy during that period of loneliness. I showed compassion at times, and I showed concern. But neither of those are empathy.
“You got your life back the moment you returned to work,” she often told me. “This is so hard for me, and you just don’t get that.”
I would respond the only way I knew how—egocentrically and analytically: “My job pays for everything and gives us health insurance. I have to work, Kristen. Never mind that I hate my job, and that it makes me miserable, and then I come home to total anguish. My life’s hard, too.”
Responses like that did a lot of damage, as did my subsequent attempts at guidance: “So, if this is all too much for you, then let’s figure something out. Let’s schedule our days so we can be sure you’re getting a break when you need one.”
She tried (God, how she tried) to explain that she wasn’t looking for solutions. She wasn’t looking for sob stories about my job. All she was looking for was this: “Mmm-hmm. I totally hear you.” That’s all.
“Emily wouldn’t sleep today? Mmm-hmm. I totally hear you. That must have been rough.”
“You’re mad because I got to go golfing with customers today and we had sushi for lunch? Mmm-hmm. I totally see your point. It’s not fair that I get to do those things and you don’t.”
“You need a few minutes to yourself when I get home? Mmm-hmm. I get it. You must be exhausted.”
It should have been that simple. She didn’t need me to fix anything for her (but when she did, she knew how to ask). She didn’t need me to coddle her. She just needed me to listen and appreciate her situation. But you couldn’t tell me that back then. Not without a few hours of analytical follow-up discussion.
Everything changed when we discovered that I have Asperger syndrome. My diagnosis gave Kristen a new perspective on things. Finding it too painful to concede that her husband wasn’t willing to put himself in her shoes, she instead put her faith in the bullet point: because of his syndrome, my husband isn’t able to put himself in my shoes. This made things much more bearable for her. Dave doesn’t understand my feelings . . . because his brain can’t process them. Dave didn’t put my needs above his own . . . because he didn’t see I was depressed. Dave makes hurtful comments about my abilities as a mom . . . because he doesn’t understand how difficult motherhood is.
Prior to my diagnosis, Kristen often told me in frustration, “You just don’t GET IT, Dave.” Now that we know I have Asperger’s, Kristen still finds herself saying those exact words all the time. The difference is that she now says them calmly, as a matter of fact. “You just don’t get it, Dave. Your brain doesn’t work that way.”
A diagnosis is not a cure, of course. It’s a starting point. My hope was that I could hone some of the cognitive processes associated with empathy, such as perspective switching and behavior prediction, as a skill of sorts, and find other ways to compensate for the lack of affective prowess. Things like keeping a Journal of Best Practices.
Kristen believed that I could cultivate certain social skills that would pass for empathy in a pinch, and I was excited when she agreed to work with me to develop them. She suggested that we start with listening skills. “You’re doing awesome with the talking,” she told me one morning as we were cleaning up the kids’ breakfasts, which were all over the kitchen floor. “But sometimes, all I need is for you to listen. Let me vent so I can feel better.” I tore a page out of the New Yorker that was sitting on our countertop, grabbed a pen, and scribbled down Empathy—sometimes she just needs you to listen. I said that seemed easy enough and asked what else we could work on, and she smiled. “Let’s just get you listening. I think that’s enough for now.”
With Kristen’s help, I dabbled for a few months in the art of listening. She had been right—it wasn’t easy. My natural tendencies were hard to overcome. Kristen would start talking about frustrations at her job, and I’d interrupt her with unsolicited practical advice. She would stare blankly into her day planner and mention, as if to herself, “I just don’t know when to schedule this new kid on my caseload.” I’d get involved, saying something like, “How many kids do you see on Wednesdays? Where are they located? I can help you make a spreadsheet that includes travel times and then we can pinpoint the optimal time slot for him.” Other times, she made not-so-subtle hints asking for help, which I blew off. “Ugh!” she’d growl, tripping over a tower of wooden blocks. “This toy room is a mess!” I’d stand next to her, nodding: “Mmm-hmm. I know what you mean.” Then I’d go watch TV, leaving her to deal with the cleanup.
The misinterpretations of Kristen’s needs were nonstop, as were my attempts at drawing out relevant discussions. Her shoes were kind of hurting her toes; she wished she knew how batteries worked; she was feeling a little groggy lately. These situations didn’t require immediate action or extended dialogue. Just a nod. But how was I to know? Never mind the fact that I had just mastered talking again; around Kristen, I was like a golden retriever who had suddenly learned how to speak English. I had so much to say about every topic. “Tell me more about your paper cut! I’ll heat up some coffee!”
We inevitably argued as frustration over the process and over my shortcomings manifested itself. “There’s nothing to sort out, Dave,” she’d say, rolling her eyes. “I was just mentioning that my normal route to work was slow today.” And I’d wonder, If you didn’t want to hammer out a solution, then why did you bring it up?
Frustration was to be expected. Like a wobbly, newborn fawn, I was having trouble getting on my feet. It might have been cute the first few times I messed up, but we’d been at it for a couple of months and I was starting to get upset by my lack of progress. Screw this empathy. But Kristen kept encouraging me. “You have to remember that your brain doesn’t process this naturally. This may never come easily for you, but you’re doing great.”
That autumn, Kristen’s dad, Jim, became seriously ill and was hospitalized for two weeks. Because her parents are divorced, and because she is their only child, the responsibility of Jim’s care fell entirely on Kristen. I’ve heard of other people our age flying across the country to take care of their parents after they had fallen ill. Some had considered the geographical divide a reasonable excuse to leave after a few days, while others had made longer-term arrangements. We didn’t have to worry about that. Jim happened to live only a few miles away from us.
The first few days Jim was in the hospital were chaotic, and I did my best to be supportive while I silently obsessed over the notion of how this hospitalization might interrupt my week. (Silently, meaning it was something of a personal accomplishment not to have mentioned it.) Kristen needed to be at the hospital all day, so I stayed home with the kids. It was just as well that I did—I’m pretty useless in hospitals because I am absolutely terrified of them. The few times I visited Jim I was pale and sweaty and nurses were constantly asking if I needed to lie down. Upon entering his room, I was always told to have a seat. But where? The sickest people within a hundred miles of my house are right here in this building, and probably half of them have sat in that chair. I touched nothing, said nothing—just stared at my feet, pressing my fingertips to my face to make sure I was still conscious. Nurses greeted me with a pat on the back—“And this greenish-looking fellow must be Kristen’s husband! Heard a lot about you!” Oh, lord. Please don’t touch me.
Kristen, in her usual way, handled things much better than I did. She’d kick back and lounge in a soft hospital chair, putting her feet up on her dad’s bed. She’d watch television, read magazines, or talk to other patients while her dad slept. Sometimes, under protest from me, she would wake Jim up to let him know I was there. He’d ask how I was doing, he’d joke about the hospital food, and I would offer monosyllabic responses, aware that my breathing was shallow and frantic—aware that I could die at any second. How could he do this to me? Kristen would grab me by the hand and try her best to keep the conversation going, knowing how much her dad loved to talk to me.
We made it through the first week without much difficulty, but things started to unravel the following week. The specialist hadn’t shown up for a few days, the neurologist wasn’t being responsive to Kristen’s concerns, and the insurance people were making things impossibly—almost artfully—difficult. Kristen’s spirit was waning and instead of listening I tried rolling up my sleeves and fixing everything for her.
“Venting solves nothing,” I told her one evening. “We need to track down this specialist and confront him. We need to find an advocate who will help us with the insurance stuff. And if the neurologist is blowing you off, then I’ll go stand in front of him until he agrees to listen to you.”
“Dave, forget it. I can handle this. I just wanted to talk.”
“So, let’s talk. Let’s put a game plan together.”
She looked at me for a second or two, then said, “Forget it. I’m tired,” and went to bed.
I spent the rest of the evening sitting at the kitchen table with my notebook, writing about what had happened to see if I could determine where I’d gone wrong. What may have been plainly obvious to someone else had left me confounded—I simply couldn’t interpret her reaction. I replayed the exchange countless times in my head and got nowhere. Finally, I wrote down, Just be there for her. I was still stumped as to how, so I packed up and called it a night.
The next day, I let the kids enjoy an all-day cartoons marathon. I was lying with them on the couch, still in my pajamas, staring at the ceiling and devising a strategy for Jim’s care, when Kristen called. Her voice sounded small and shaky. Defeated.
“Can you come and get me?” she asked.
“Sure. What about the kids?”
“My mom’s on her way over to watch them. I just . . .” She paused and sighed as if the air were too heavy to hold. “When she gets there, just come over. Please.”
When I arrived at the hospital, Kristen was outside, waiting. Her face looked strained, as though she were bracing herself against the cold wind. I kept telling myself to simply be there for her, whatever that meant. I wanted to do this right.
Sliding into the front seat of my car, Kristen sniffled, and I could see that she was fighting back tears. I put my hand on her leg and asked if she was okay, and she nodded. “Just drive somewhere,” she said. I shifted my car into drive and began circling the parking lot, slowly and awkwardly. Has she snapped? Does she want food? Does she want to hear some music? On our third time around, she asked me what I was doing, and I admitted that I didn’t know and was afraid to ask. “Just go somewhere,” she said. “But not here.”
I was pulling onto the highway when Kristen finally made it clear how I needed to help her. “Okay,” she said, trying to sound patient, as if it were perfectly normal to have to tell her husband how to engage with her. “I need to talk, and I just need you to listen to me. You may not interrupt me, you may not offer to fix anything for me, you may not give me any advice, and you may not act like you’re as mad as I am. Okay? I just need you to listen.”
“Okay.” Just drive and listen. It was a test, and with things having been spelled out so clearly, I finally felt ready for it.
For ten minutes, Kristen unloaded. As she slashed her way through her anger and frustration, I went into hyper-stifling mode, indicating that I was listening by nodding my head and offering single-word responses instead of what was on my mind:
“. . . He can hardly walk to the bathroom . . .”
“Mmm-hmm.” You really should eat something—your body needs nutrition.
“. . . And then this new doctor who I’ve never seen before comes in and starts talking about discharging Dad . . .”
“Okay.” I hope you can get home early tonight. Emily’s been sad at bedtime without you.
“. . . And he is obviously freezing in there this morning, and nobody brought him a blanket . . .”
“Man.” What?! Those bastards. Give me two minutes in front of that charge nurse and I swear to God, your dad will be swimming in blankets.
We were making a U-turn by a cleared soybean field outside of town when I realized that for the past ten minutes, I hadn’t been making things harder for Kristen. Instead, I had been listening and it had felt good. It was a victory for me, and for Kristen, who had finally found the way to get through to me: directness. It wasn’t exactly empathy, and it wasn’t exactly romantic, but it worked. I wanted to ask her for a high five, but it seemed an odd thing to ask of someone whose father was hooked up to machines, so instead I did my best to expand our moment of success. “Right.” “Yep.” “I understand.”
Later that evening, I sat down in the family room with my notebook and logged our first real victory in what I hoped would become a successful path to empathy, or something like it. Sometimes, she just needs you to listen. I was scribbling some thoughts about the difficulty in knowing when and how to listen, and how I needed Kristen to tell me what she needed from me, when she came downstairs in her pajamas and joined me. “Hi, hang on,” I said.
She sat patiently on the couch until I finished, and when I closed my notebook, she said the most amazing thing I’d heard in months: “I know today wasn’t easy for you, but that drive was exactly what I needed. It made all the difference in the world to me. Thank you so much.”
Yes.
I wanted to talk about our win. I wanted her to read my journal entry. But I didn’t want to blow the progress I’d just made, so I kept my response short: “I’m glad it helped. I want to be there for you.” Today I felt a little more like the husband I want to be for you. I mean, who knows? Maybe over time, this will even become my typical way of behaving! Wouldn’t that be great? I can totally see myself being Mr. Empathy! “I love you,” I added.
“I love you, too.”
She kissed me good night and had made it halfway up the stairs before I finally burst.
“Hey, today was really exciting for me.” She stopped, and I got up from the couch to continue: “I mean, I know this week isn’t about me, and I should probably not talk right now, but I’ve been going nuts trying to develop this empathy. I know I wasn’t quite empathic this afternoon, but it did feel good to give you what you needed, even if you had to ask for it.”
“It felt good for me, too.” She yawned.
“Just think. If I can talk and listen, and somehow do it all without being selfish, then I’ll pretty much be the total package. Right?”
She continued up the steps, laughing. “That’s right. A selfless man who knows when to listen. I don’t know what more a woman could ask for.”
I honestly don’t know, either. Seriously. What else could there be?