“So,” John continues, “last night, Margo asks me to come to bed, and I tell her I’ll be there in a minute, I have to answer a few emails. Normally after about two minutes she’ll be all over me—Why aren’t you coming to bed? Why are you always working? But last night, she doesn’t do any of that. And I’m amazed! I think, Jesus Christ, something’s finally working in her therapy, because she’s realizing that nagging me about coming to bed isn’t going to get me in bed any faster. So I finish my emails, but when I get in bed, Margo’s asleep. Anyway, this morning, when we wake up, Margo says, ‘I’m glad you got your work done, but I miss you. I miss you a lot. I just want you to know that I miss you.’”
John turns to his left and now I hear what he hears—a nearby conversation about lighting—and without his saying a word, I’m staring at John’s sneakers again as they move across the floor. When I see his face appear this time, the wall behind him is gone, and now the star of the TV series is in the distant background in the upper-right corner of my screen, laughing with his on-camera nemesis along with the love interest he verbally abuses on the show. (I’m sure John is the one who writes this character.)
I love these actors, so now I’m squinting at the three of them through my screen like I’m one of those people behind the ropes at the Emmys trying to get a glimpse of a celebrity—except this isn’t the red carpet and I’m watching them take sips from water bottles while they chat between scenes. The paparazzi would kill for this view, I think, and it takes massive willpower to focus solely on John.
“Anyway,” he whispers, “I knew it was too good to be true. I thought she was being understanding last night, but of course the complaining starts up again first thing this morning. So I say, ‘You miss me? What kind of guilt trip is that?’ I mean, I’m right here. I’m here every night. I’m one hundred percent loyal. Never cheated, never will. I provide a nice living. I’m an involved father. I even take care of the dog because Margo says she hates walking around with plastic bags of poop. And when I’m not there, I’m working. It’s not like I’m off in Cabo all day. So I tell her I can quit my job and she can miss me less because I’ll be twiddling my thumbs at home, or I can keep my job and we’ll have a roof over our heads.” He yells “I’ll just be a minute!” to someone I can’t see and then continues. “And you know what she does when I say this? She says, all Oprah-like”—here he does a dead-on impression of Oprah—“‘I know you do a lot, and I appreciate that, but I also miss you even when you’re here.’”
I try to speak but John plows on. I haven’t seen him this stirred up before.
“So for a second I’m relieved, because normally she’d yell at this point, but then I realize what’s going on. This sounds nothing like Margo. She’s up to something! And sure enough, she says, ‘I really need you to hear this.’ And I say, ‘I hear it, okay? I’m not deaf. I’ll try to come to bed earlier but I have to get my work done first.’ But then she gets this sad look on her face, like she’s about to cry, and it kills me when she gets that look, because I don’t want to make her sad. The last thing I want to do is disappoint her. But before I can say anything, she says, ‘I need you to hear how much I miss you because if you don’t hear it, I don’t know how much longer I can keep telling you.’ So I say, ‘We’re threatening each other now?’ and she says, ‘It’s not a threat, it’s the truth.’” John’s eyes become saucers and his free hand juts into the air, palm up, as if to say, Can you believe this shit?
“I don’t think she’d actually do it,” he goes on, “but it shocked me because neither of us has ever threatened to leave before. When we got married we always said that no matter how angry we got, we would never threaten to leave, and in twelve years, we haven’t.” He looks to his right. “Okay, Tommy, let me take a look—”
John stops talking and suddenly I’m staring at his sneakers again. When he finishes with Tommy, he starts walking somewhere. A minute later his face pops up; he’s in front of another wall.
“John,” I say. “Let’s take a step back. First, I know you’re upset by what Margo said—”
“What Margo said? It’s not even her! It’s her idiot therapist acting as her ventriloquist! She loves this guy. She quotes him all the time, like he’s her fucking guru. He probably serves Kool-Aid in the waiting room, and women all over the city are divorcing their husbands because they’re drinking this guy’s bullshit! I looked him up just to see what his credentials are and, sure enough, some moron therapy board gave him a license. Wendell Bronson, P-h-fucking-D.”
Wait.
Wendell Bronson?
!
!!
!!!!
!!!!!!!
Margo is seeing my Wendell? The “idiot therapist” is Wendell? My mind explodes. I wonder where on the couch Margo chose to sit on her first day. I wonder if Wendell tosses her tissue boxes or if she sits close enough to reach them herself. I wonder if we’ve ever passed each other on the way in or out (the pretty crying woman from the waiting room?). I wonder if she’s ever mentioned my name in her own therapy—“John has this awful therapist, Lori Gottlieb, who said . . .” But then I remember that John is keeping his therapy a secret from Margo—I’m the “hooker” he pays in cash—and right now, I’m tremendously grateful for this circumstance. I don’t know what to do with this information, so I do what therapists are taught to do when we’re having a complicated reaction to something and need more time to understand it. I do nothing—for the moment. I’ll get consultation on this later.
“Let’s stay with Margo for a second,” I say, as much to myself as to John. “I think what she said was sweet. She must really love you.”
“Huh? She’s threatening to leave!”
“Well, let’s look at it another way,” I say. “We’ve talked before about how there’s a difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request. But a complaint can also be an unvoiced compliment. I know that what Margo says often feels like a series of complaints. And they are—but they’re sweet complaints because inside each complaint, she’s giving you a compliment. The presentation isn’t optimal, but she’s saying that she loves you. She wants more of you. She misses you. She’s asking you to come closer. And now she’s saying that the experience of wanting to be with you and not having that reciprocated is so painful that she might not be able to tolerate it because she loves you so much.” I wait to let him absorb that last part. “That’s quite a compliment.”
I’m always working with John on identifying his in-the-moment feelings, because feelings lead to behaviors. Once we know what we’re feeling, we can make choices about where we want to go with them. But if we push them away the second they appear, often we end up veering off in the wrong direction, getting lost yet again in the land of chaos.
Men tend to be at a disadvantage here because they aren’t typically raised to have a working knowledge of their internal worlds; it’s less socially acceptable for men to talk about their feelings. While women feel cultural pressure to keep up their physical appearance, men feel that pressure to keep up their emotional appearance. Women tend to confide in friends or family members, but when men tell me how they feel in therapy, I’m almost always the first person they’ve said it to. Like my female patients, men struggle with marriage, self-esteem, identity, success, their parents, their childhoods, being loved and understood—and yet these topics can be tricky to bring up in any meaningful way with their male friends. It’s no wonder that the rates of substance abuse and suicide in middle-aged men continue to increase. Many men don’t feel they have any other place to turn.