Claire and I will have other conflicts. I know this because we are both alive and in a relationship and relationships involve conflict. The hope is not that we don’t have them but that we handle them with more honesty and less accumulation than we did this time. The hope is that neither of us lets things build to the point of uninvitation again, because we now know what the cost of that looks like and neither of us wants to pay it.
That hope is not a guarantee. It is a direction.
## Owen and Me, Specifically
I want to say one more thing about Owen, because I think his role in this story is undervalued by any framing that treats him as background.
He did several things that were, in my view, genuinely difficult and genuinely right. He asked for my account directly, without prompting. He read the contract. He asked Claire to say the exact words rather than the interpretation. He did not pretend he had information he didn’t have, and he did not pretend he had formed a view before he had one. He waited until he understood the situation and then he acted on that understanding, which meant telling Claire something hard in a way that moved things forward.
He also did not make me the point of the conversation. He was not, at any point, building a case against Claire or inviting me to build one. He was trying to understand what had happened so that he could be a good partner to his future wife in addressing it. The difference between those two things is significant.