The room was quiet for a moment.
Nathan said, “I know.”
“I’m not saying it to hurt you,” I said.
“I know,” he said again. “I’m just — I’m sitting with what three years means.”
Dr. Mehta let that sit for a while before moving on. It’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about her. She doesn’t rush toward resolution when the difficult thing needs to be fully in the room first.
## How Priya Sees It
Priya has a particular theory about marriages in the kind of trouble ours had been in. She has held this theory for some time and has articulated various versions of it to me over the years, and I think it has sharpened through watching our situation from the outside.
Her theory, in brief: the problem in these marriages isn’t what happened. It’s who decided what was a problem.
“Nathan decided the trip was fine,” she said, over lunch. “He decided that adding his mother was a reasonable adjustment. He decided that your discomfort was something that could be managed, maybe with an apology, maybe with some assurance that it would be fine. He was the one deciding what the situation was.”
“Right,” I said.
“And that’s the pattern. Not just the trip. Who decides what’s a problem, what’s reasonable, what’s a big enough deal to require action versus what’s something the other person can be talked out of. In a lot of relationships, one person has significantly more of that power than the other, and neither of them necessarily planned it that way.”