What You Tell Me First

The first thing a man tells me is almost never the thing. I have come to think of it as a door being tested rather than opened, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to stop treating it as the subject.

It arrives polished. He has had it in his head for weeks, possibly years, and by the time it reaches me it has been edited into something manageable. That is not dishonesty. It is the reasonable behaviour of a man who has learned that saying the true version out loud, to the wrong person, costs more than keeping it.

What he is actually doing is watching how I take it. Not the words, the reception. Whether I flinch, whether I get enthusiastic in a way that suggests I am performing, whether I move too quickly to reassure him. Reassurance is the one that gives the game away most often, because a man who is being reassured about the small confession understands immediately that the large one is not welcome.

So I take the first one plainly. No particular warmth, no particular reaction. Received, noted, unremarkable. That is not coldness, it is the only response that leaves the door open, and men are very good at reading it correctly even when they could not describe what they read.

The real one comes later, and it is usually smaller than the rehearsed one. That surprises people. They expect the buried thing to be more extreme, and it is generally more ordinary and more specific. Not an act. A circumstance. Something about being looked at, or not being asked, or a particular sentence somebody said to him a long time ago that he has never repeated since.

The extreme version was easier to say because it was less true. Nobody is embarrassed by a fantasy they have read described elsewhere. They are embarrassed by the one that has their own life in it.

I do not chase it. Asking directly produces an answer, but it produces the answer he thinks is wanted, and then we are both further from it than when we started. The thing arrives when he has decided it can, and my only real contribution is to have been unremarkable enough, for long enough, that the decision was available to him.

Some men never get there and that is a complete arrangement in itself. But when it does arrive, it arrives quietly, usually attached to something else, and if you are not paying attention you will miss it entirely and he will not offer it twice.