Communication lessons people learned the hard way

all that time i was feeling everything and it was just. nowhere. it was nowhere she could find it. i kept thinking love was a thing that just existed between people automatically, that you didn't have to keep building it or whatever. i was wrong about that and it took her telling me she felt alone while i was right there. i'm not totally over that.

The grudge felt like a real thing right up until it didn't. I can't explain the switch properly. It wasn't the diagnosis that did it, not exactly. More like I looked at what I'd been carrying and realised it wasn't actually heavy, it just had sharp edges. That's the closest I can get to explaining it. Might not make sense to someone else.

I don't think the tracking came from nowhere. I think I was anxious, probably always a bit anxious, about whether I was loved back properly, whether the whole thing was stable and real. And instead of sitting with that I converted it into a system. Systems have outputs. Systems are manageable. I know how to work a system. But what I had actually built was a prosecution case. Fifteen line items and a running total and I was building the case against someone who was just, as far as I can tell looking back, trying to be in a relationship with me. I still make spreadsheets. That is my job, I'm not going to stop doing my job. But there is a difference between tracking a budget and tracking a person and I knew that difference. I did know it. I just didn't apply it. Or I applied it too late, which is functionally the same thing. The two pence gap. I kept closing the two pence gap when it didn't matter and I missed the thing that did. I keep coming back to that. Not sure it leads anywhere useful. I just keep coming back to it.

I thought keeping things to myself was a form of kindness. I genuinely believed that. It wasn't kindness. It was just quieter. She was sitting next to me all those years with no idea there was anything to know, which is its own kind of loneliness for a person. For her I mean. I was lonely too but I'd made myself that way on purpose, or near enough as makes no difference.

I'm not sure jealousy is even the right word for what I had. Jealousy suggests there's something real to be jealous of. This was more like fear with nowhere to put itself. I kept handing it to her to carry and calling that intimacy. It wasn't. It was just weight. And the thing is I knew this somewhere, I think most people know this somewhere, but knowing it and actually stopping are quite different things. I had a book about attachment styles that I'd bought and not really read past chapter two, which is maybe a lesson in itself. Or maybe not. I don't want to oversell what I've learned here.

I think when you never explain yourself to a kid they don't learn to follow logic, they learn to wait you out. And then when they're big enough to wait you out properly, they do. I'm not sure it's more complicated than that. We were the adults so we made the rules, and that was fine, but we never once said here's why this rule exists and here's what we're actually worried about. So they never had a reason to care about the rule itself, only about whether we were watching.

I don't really have a lesson, I'm not that kind of person. I think the honest version is just, we were all in the same room for years and kind of not there. And then we were. And the thing that did it was twenty minutes and a rule that started as a joke. I keep thinking about how close we came to just not doing it. If my wife had said nah I'm tired, that would have been it. Done. We'd still be sitting there with our phones. I genuinely don't know what that means. Maybe nothing. Maybe it means Roisin accidentally fixed us without meaning to, which she would absolutely hate me saying.

I don't know if waiting was a mistake exactly. That's the honest answer. If we'd gone earlier, maybe we fix things, maybe we learn to talk before we've already half-given up. Or maybe we just drag it out another three years and end up in the same place but older and more tired. I genuinely don't know. I've gone back and forth on it. What I do think is that the leaflet sitting on the microwave for four months was about embarrassment more than anything else. Like admitting something was wrong meant we had failed at doing it ourselves. My mum's generation didn't go to therapy, you just got on with it, and I think that was in my head more than I realised. We didn't go until we were almost out of road and part of that was just. I don't know. Pride, maybe. Not wanting to say out loud that we needed help. The six sessions cost us about four hundred quid in total. Which, on a single parent income now, I notice. But I also think about the years before that when we were just standing in the same kitchen not saying things and I can't work out which cost more.

He knew. I still believe he knew. But I said it to myself so many times that week that it started to sound like a thing people say rather than a thing that's true. There's a difference between someone knowing a thing and you having actually told them. I understand that now and I wish I didn't because it's a useless thing to understand after.

I don't know if it saved us exactly. Hard to prove a negative. But the stuff that quietly destroys other couples, money especially, we'd already put it on the table before it had the chance to become a secret.

I think the apology told him something he needed to know. That I wasn't one of those dads who just moves on and pretends. That he was allowed to be upset when I got things wrong. I don't know that it changed everything though. I still lose my temper sometimes. I'm still not great at it.

The first reaction is the one they remember. I know that now.

I think I believed that needing help was a sign that I hadn't prepared well enough, like if I'd just been more organised or slept less or budgeted better then I wouldn't need to ask anyone for anything. And maybe that's true sometimes but mostly it's just not how life works, not with a kid and shifts and an ex who's unreliable and a boiler that goes twice a year. People mostly want to help. Bex wanted to do that roast. My mum genuinely liked having Kieran on Thursdays. I was taking something away from them by always saying no, I'd never thought of it that way. Asking is a skill I didn't have and I'm still learning it, sort of slowly and badly, but still.

I don't know what I'd tell myself. Say it sooner, obviously. But I'm not sure I would have listened.

Staying angry at someone who has probably forgotten the thing ever happened is not protection, it is just a habit that keeps running. It did not hurt her. She was fine, got a job somewhere else, probably did not think about me at all. I was the one replaying a planning meeting from 2019 while making pasta on a Tuesday.

They probably did know, somewhere. But there's a difference between someone knowing a thing and someone having been told it clearly, at least once, without any ambiguity. I understood that difference too late and I'm still not sure I've fully corrected it even now.

I don't know if I was wrong to finally say something. I think I was wrong to wait so long that when I did say it, it came out like that. Like a bin that had been overfull for months and someone finally just sat on the lid. If I'd said something about the fifty quid when it was just the fifty quid, maybe we'd have argued and sorted it and that would've been that. Or maybe not. Maybe it would've ended the same way. I genuinely do not know.