On the Conversation You Will Never Have

There is a conversation you have rehearsed for years. You have a version for when it goes well and a version for when it does not, and you have refined both, and you are not going to have it.

I am not going to tell you that you should. I do not know your life, I do not know who is in it, and a stranger urging you to blow something open is a stranger who will not be there afterwards. Plenty of men have very good reasons, and some of those reasons are other people, and being told to be brave about it is easy advice given by someone with nothing at stake.

But I would like you to stop doing the thing you are doing with it, which is holding it permanently at the edge of possible. Not having it, and not deciding not to have it. That is the exhausting arrangement. It means the conversation is live every day, it costs you something every day, and it never once moves.

Decide. If it is not going to happen, say so to yourself, in a whole sentence, and let it be a decision rather than a delay. That sounds bleak. It is not, and men are always surprised by how much it gives back, because what has been draining you was never the wanting. It was the daily unresolved reaching for it.

And then be careful about what you do with the space. The temptation is to decide this is therefore a thing you must never feel, and to shut the whole of it away, which is how a man ends up hollowed out and very pleasant to be around. That is not what I am asking.

You can hold something honestly without acting on it and without pretending it is not there. That is the position. It is not a compromise, and it is not second best, and it is available to you today, which the conversation is not.