Meanwhile, about a mile away, in a quaint brick building on a narrow one-way street, a therapist named Wendell is in his office seeing patients too. One after another, they’re sitting on his sofa, adjacent to a lovely garden courtyard, talking about the same kinds of things that my patients have been talking to me about on an upper floor of a tall glass office building. Wendell’s patients have seen him for weeks or months or perhaps even years, but I have yet to meet him. In fact, I haven’t even heard of him. But that’s about to change.
I am about to become Wendell’s newest patient.
2
If the Queen Had Balls
Chart note, Lori:
Patient in her mid-forties presents for treatment in the aftermath of an unexpected breakup. Reports that she seeks “just a few sessions to get through this.”
It all starts with a presenting problem.
By definition, the presenting problem is the issue that sends a person into therapy. It might be a panic attack, a job loss, a death, a birth, a relational difficulty, an inability to make a big life decision, or a bout of depression. Sometimes the presenting problem is less specific—a feeling of “stuckness” or the vague but nagging notion that something just isn’t quite right.
Whatever the problem, it generally “presents” because the person has reached an inflection point in life. Do I turn left or right? Do I try to preserve the status quo or move into uncharted territory? (Be forewarned: therapy will always take you into uncharted territory, even if you choose to preserve the status quo.)
But people don’t care about inflection points when they come for their first therapy session. Mostly, they just want relief. They want to tell you their stories, beginning with their presenting problem.
So let me fill you in on the Boyfriend Incident.
The first thing I want to say about Boyfriend is that he’s an extraordinarily decent human being. He’s kind and generous, funny and smart, and when he’s not making you laugh, he’ll drive to the drugstore at two a.m. to get you that antibiotic you just can’t wait until morning for. If he happens to be at Costco, he’ll text to ask if you need anything, and when you reply that you just need some laundry detergent, he’ll bring home your favorite meatballs and twenty jugs of maple syrup for the waffles he makes you from scratch. He’ll carry those twenty jugs from the garage to your kitchen, pack nineteen of them neatly into the tall cabinet you can’t reach, and place one on the counter, accessible for the morning.
He’ll also leave love notes on your desk, hold your hand and open doors, and never complain about being dragged to family events because he genuinely enjoys hanging out with your relatives, even the nosy or elderly ones. For no reason at all, he’ll send you Amazon packages full of books (books being the equivalent of flowers to you), and at night you’ll both curl up and read passages from them aloud to each other, pausing only to make out. While you’re binge-watching Netflix, he’ll rub that spot on your back where you have mild scoliosis, and when he stops, and you nudge him, he’ll continue rubbing for exactly sixty more delicious seconds before he tries to weasel out without your noticing (you’ll pretend not to notice). He’ll let you finish his sandwiches and sentences and sunscreen and listen so attentively to the details of your day that, like your personal biographer, he’ll remember more about your life than you will.
If this portrait sounds skewed, it is. There are many ways to tell a story, and if I’ve learned anything as a therapist, it’s that most people are what therapists call “unreliable narrators.” That’s not to say that they purposely mislead. It’s more that every story has multiple threads, and they tend to leave out the strands that don’t jibe with their perspectives. Most of what patients tell me is absolutely true—from their current points of view. Ask about somebody’s spouse while they’re both still in love, then ask about that same spouse post-divorce, and each time, you’ll get only half the story.
What you just heard about Boyfriend? That was the good half.
And now for the bad: It’s ten o’clock on a weeknight. We’re in bed, talking, and we’ve just decided which movie tickets to preorder for the weekend when Boyfriend goes strangely silent.
“You tired?” I ask. We’re both working single parents in our mid-forties, so ordinarily an exhausted silence would mean nothing. Even when we aren’t exhausted, sitting in silence together feels peaceful, relaxing. But if silence can be heard, tonight’s silence sounds different. If you’ve ever been in love, you know the kind of silence I’m talking about: silence on a frequency only your significant other can perceive.
“No,” he says. It’s one syllable but his voice shakes subtly, followed by more unsettling silence. I look over at him. He looks back. He smiles, I smile, and a deafening silence descends again, broken only by the rustling sound his twitching foot is making under the covers. Now I’m alarmed. In my office I can sit through marathon silences, but in my bedroom I last no more than three seconds.
“Hey, is something up?” I ask, trying to sound casual, but it’s a rhetorical question if ever there was one. The answer is obviously yes, because in the history of the world, nothing reassuring has ever followed this question. When I see couples in therapy, even if the initial response is no, in time the true answer is revealed to be some variation of I’m cheating, I maxed out the credit cards, my aging mother is coming to live with us, or I’m not in love with you anymore.
Boyfriend’s response is no exception.
He says: “I’ve decided that I can’t live with a kid under my roof for the next ten years.”
I’ve decided that I can’t live with a kid under my roof for the next ten years?
I burst out laughing. I know there’s nothing funny about what Boyfriend has said, but given that we’re planning to spend our lives together and I have an eight-year-old, it sounds so ridiculous that I decide it has to be a joke.
Boyfriend says nothing, so I stop laughing. I look at him. He looks away.
“What in the world are you talking about? What do mean, you can’t live with a kid for the next ten years?”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry for what?” I ask, still catching up. “You mean you’re serious? You don’t want to be together?”
He explains that he does want to be together, but now that his teenagers are leaving for college soon, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t want to wait another ten years for the nest to be empty.
My jaw drops. Literally. I feel it open and hang in the air for a while. This is the first I’m hearing of this, and it takes a minute before my jaw is able to snap back into position so I can speak. My head is saying, Whaaaaaat? but my mouth says, “How long have you felt this way? If I hadn’t just asked if something was up, when were you going to tell me?” I think about how this can’t possibly be happening because just five minutes ago, we picked our movie for the weekend. We’re supposed to be together this weekend. At a movie!
“I don’t know,” he says sheepishly. He shrugs without moving his shoulders. His entire body is a shrug. “It never felt like the right time to bring it up.” (When my therapist friends hear this part of the story, they immediately diagnose him as “avoidant.” When my nontherapist friends hear it, they immediately diagnose him as “an asshole.”)