The Thing You Did Not Ask For

Almost every man who writes to me arrives with a request already formed. He has thought about it, sometimes for years, and by the time it reaches me it has hardened into a particular shape with particular words. He wants that, and he would like to know whether he can have it.

Frequently he can. It is rarely the part he remembers.

What he remembers, months later, tends to be incidental. An instruction given in passing and followed without thinking. A sentence I wrote about something else entirely. The evening he was told to do nothing at all and found it unaccountably difficult. None of that was requested. Most of it was not, in the ordinary sense, even arranged.

I have come to think this is because a request is a description of what a man already knows about himself, and by definition it cannot contain the parts he has not met yet. He asks for the thing he has been circling. What he has been circling is usually a symptom of something he has not looked at directly, and he cannot ask for that, because he does not yet have a name for it.

So I take the request seriously and I do not treat it as the brief. It is closer to an opening statement. It tells me what he believes about himself, which is useful, and where he has drawn his own edges, which is more useful still, because the edges are almost never where he thinks they are.

There is a way of doing this badly. A woman can decide she knows a man better than he knows himself and use that as licence to override everything he actually said, which is not insight. It is rudeness with a theory attached. What he asked for is real. If he has said no to something, that no is load bearing and it stays. The room I am describing is the room inside what he has already agreed to, and it is a great deal larger than most men imagine when they write their careful opening paragraph.

The good version of this is quiet. He notices, some weeks in, that the thing occupying him is not the thing he came for, and he is usually a little embarrassed about it. There is no need to be. He asked for what he could see. It would be a strange arrangement that only ever handed a man what he could already imagine.