## Counseling
The counselor was a woman named Dr. Mehta, whose office was in a converted house about twenty minutes from ours. She had a direct, unhurried way of asking questions that I liked immediately. Nathan was more cautious at first — he has a slight, unexamined resistance to the idea that he might need guidance from someone outside the family — but he warmed to her over the first session.
We went twice before I’m writing this down. I don’t have the perspective yet to say what it’s doing for us. What I can say is that the act of sitting in a room with someone who asks questions and requires answers, in a context where neither of us can default to our habitual patterns — Nathan’s management-by-assurance, my management-by-absorption — is already changing the shape of some of our conversations.
In the second session Dr. Mehta asked Nathan a question that I keep thinking about: “When you imagine Olivia being fully supported in this marriage, what does that look like?”
He thought about it for a while. Then he said something that surprised me. He said: “I think it looks like me knowing what she needs without her having to tell me every time.”
Dr. Mehta said: “And how would you know?”
He said: “I’d have to pay attention.”
He said it simply, not as a revelation but as something he was just now recognizing as obvious. I looked at him across the room and thought: we have been married for ten years and this is what we are still learning. And then I thought: good. The alternative is that we stopped.