He is a good man. I want to say this and mean it and not have it read as a concession or a qualification. Nathan is careful and responsible and largely kind. He does not have a temper; his version of anger is a long, cool silence that is actually harder to deal with than raised voices because it gives me nothing to push back against. He pays attention to things I say and tries to act on them, which is more than a lot of people manage. He remembered, for our fifth anniversary, that I had mentioned in passing three years earlier that I wanted to see a specific play, and he got tickets without telling me and it was the best anniversary we had up to that point.
He is also a man who has a profound difficulty drawing limits with his mother, who has built his identity substantially around the idea of being a good son, and who processes his own grief for his father through the act of taking care of her — which means that her grief, and her needs, and her loneliness are something he cannot separate himself from without feeling like he is failing at something fundamental.
I understand this. I have understood it for years. Understanding it is, in some ways, the problem — because understanding it made it easy to make space for, to work around, to absorb. It is harder to hold a line with someone you understand and feel for than with someone whose motivations are opaque or who you’ve decided to be angry at.