I said: I agree. I’ve never thought it was only about you.
Martin wrote something on his pad.
What we did in that session — and what I mean when I say counseling helped, because it did help — was name things that had not been named. Not in the sense of accusations. In the sense of: here is what I experienced and here is what I needed and here is the gap between them. Naming the gap, specifically, was what the first three sessions were for. The fourth session was for deciding what to do differently going forward.
Going forward meant: Daniel raises things when they are small, not when they are unbearable. I raise things in the first conversation, not the fifth. We make decisions together, not in parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. These are not revolutionary insights. They are the things people say in wedding toasts, except that saying them in a toast and practicing them over time are different skills.
The Body of the House
There is a way that a house absorbs what happens in it, not literally, but in the way your relationship to each room is shaped by what the room has been used for.
For a while, my kitchen was not entirely mine. This is the most mundane version of the feeling and also the most accurate one. The kitchen was a room where I sometimes walked in and found the spices arranged differently and the dish towels folded in a way that was not wrong exactly but was not how I fold them, and where I sometimes put something down only to find it had been moved to where it made more sense to someone else.