What Happens to the Men Who Leave
Men leave. Not most, and not usually suddenly, but they do, and I have never treated it as a failure requiring explanation. What interests me is that there are two quite distinct ways of doing it and they mean opposite things.
The first kind finishes. Something in him has been resolved, or has run its course, and he notices, and he says so. These departures are almost always calm and slightly awkward, because there is no grievance available to structure the conversation and he is not sure what one says. Nothing went wrong. He simply does not need it in the way he did, and the honest version of that is a difficult sentence to construct with any grace.
Those are not losses. I mean that plainly rather than as consolation. A man who arrives with something unresolved and leaves without it has had precisely what the arrangement is for, and the fact that its success removes the need for it is a feature of the thing, not a flaw in it. I have never once tried to talk one of those men into staying.
The second kind flees, and the tell is the timing. It never happens after a difficulty. It happens shortly after something went well, usually the week after a moment of unusual honesty, and it is almost always preceded by two or three days of subtly increased distance that he would deny if asked. He got close to something, felt the size of it, and removed himself before it could be examined further.
These departures are noisier. There is generally a reason offered which does not quite fit, and sometimes a complaint constructed at short notice, and the complaint is frequently about something he had been entirely content with for months. I do not argue with it. Arguing would require him to defend a position he invented for the purpose of leaving, which is cruel and pointless, and he knows already.
What I have learned to do is make the door plain and easy. Not warm, which would be a form of pressure, and not cold, which would confirm that leaving costs him my regard. Simply open. The men in the second category are largely leaving to find out whether they can, and a difficult exit teaches them that the thing they were in was a trap, which is both untrue and unhelpful to carry away.
A reasonable number of the second kind return. I have never made anything of it and I do not require an account of the interval. He knows what happened, and having it narrated back to him would only produce the shame that drove the departure in the first place. He arrives, and we continue, and the return itself is the whole of what needed saying.
The first kind almost never return, and should not. That is the correct outcome and I would think less of it if they did.
So I hold departures lightly. A man is not obliged to remain in something because it once mattered, and the ones who leave properly, having got what they came for, are the clearest evidence that any of this works at all.