We’ve all heard the age-old question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound?”. I have a new question begging the same sort of consideration, “If a wife speaks and there is no one in the room but her husband, does she make a sound?”
Submitted for your consideration:
Wednesday at noon Dave came home for lunch. He reviewed the contents of the refrigerator and asked if I was saving the left-over chili from Monday for a dinner meal. I told him I was so he made himself a sandwich. As we were and eating lunch, I was flipping through the weekly grocery ads and noted that Foodlion had cod fillets on sale. I asked Dave if he’d like some for dinner. He said he would. So later that day I stopped by the store, only to be disappoint to find an empty spot where the cod was supposed to be. Changing gears, I went home and took a container of spaghetti sauce out of the freezer and cooked up some pasta instead.
When Dave came home that evening he found me working in the kitchen. I let him know that Foodlion was out of cod and the menu had changed to spaghetti. He kissed me and went upstairs to change his clothes.
Twenty minutes later when I called him in for dinner, he came into the kitchen and as his usual manner, lifted the lid from the pot (a habit I have tried in vain to squash) and after peering inside remarked, “I thought we were having left-over chili tonight.”
To the inexperienced, this may seem alarming. How was it possible that despite what I had told him just minutes prior to our meal that he had connected dots from our pre-lunch conversation and had somehow equated no cod with my reheating left-over chili?
But, to anyone who’s been married for a decade or so (or less if you’re more advanced) there exists a reality that there comes a point in married life when the sound of your loved one’s voice no longer pings the eardrum. It is sort of like wearing a favorite perfume or aftershave; after a while you just can’t smell it anymore. (A similar situation arises with parents and children, only children hear their parents’ voices in a manner best described as “Charlie-Brown-teacher-speak”.) And, because we’re not really hearing what the other one is saying, we compensate with what we think they’re saying.
Complicating this phenomena are the times when we are able to communicate without speaking, when I know what he’s thinking or going to say before he says it. I haven’t determined whether I’m reading his mind or placing thoughts in it. That research continues.
What I have concluded is that communication between spouses is a complex thing. As we grow together and gain the ability to finish each others’ sentences, we also seem to diminish the ability to actually listen to each other. This results in the commonly heard statements of, “You never told me that,” “how would I know” and “that’s the first I’ve heard of this!”
I guess the key in dealing with this perplexing dilemma , is to remain calm and remember that this person who seems to be totally ignoring what you say is the person who loves you most and most importantly you love above all others. We may not be hearing so well with our ears so we must remember to try all the harder to listen with our hearts. If our hearts are open our ears really don’t matter and in the big picture, neither do spaghetti and chili.