The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [69]
Luckily mind can rule matter. Artful communication lets lovers fulfill the three-in-one ideal, hopping between channels to meld the practicalities of cohabitation and cupboard love with affection, enthrallment, and animal desire. If communication falters, however, the firmest partnership may fall into the fourth, dead zone that psychologists dislike talking about: indifference.
So what is lovers’ conversation like?
At first, urgent, hoovering up details in an attachment process similar to that by which babies imprint on parents, as we do what John Donne describes in his poem “The Sun Rising” and contract the world to our little room, frequently confecting our own baby talk too. To others nauseating, this private language can be enduringly powerful; even in the dog days of marriage, my husband can access it to shut me up. (“Choglet” remains particularly effective, when he wants the last in the box.)
As a relationship is established, conversation becomes less intense, but no less important. The joy of rubbing along, side-by-side, facing a shared future instead of drowning in the beloved’s lash-wide stare, is a bond with exceptional practical benefits. However, as the thrill of performance, being witty, droops—with a sigh of relief, if the relationship is to be a refuge from the importunate world—the worth of keeping communication fresh remains correspondingly high. Get too cozy, stop entertaining each other, and undifferentiated coupledom can tip into complacency, boredom sneaking in with his pipe and slippers.
A fifty-six-year-old, otherwise happily married mother, still capable of orgasm, bemoaned the lack of ladies’ Viagra:
I’m rarely in the mood. . . . I want something that will affect my state of mind before sex. I can still remember the level of interest I used to have. That’s what I want to recapture.
How depressing. There is an unimprovable mood enhancer. Not in the medicine cabinet: between her and her spouse’s ears.
➺ Rule nine: Communicate to stimulate imagination
Proximity doesn’t equate with intimacy if you lose awareness and the relationship becomes wallpaper whose pattern you don’t notice.
Some couples go to extremes to perpetuate exciting distance, like Gallic thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy, who addresses his glamour-puss wife by the formal “Vous.” Others take a pragmatic line. Levy’s countrywoman, Colette, earwigged on the conversations between “snobs of vice” in neighboring villas on the Côte d’Azur:
“Lend me your wife,” asked a husband.
The other nodded. “If you lend me your eldest son.”
Partners who care not to share re-charge all three levels of intimacy: they listen, say nice things, but also tantalize, tease—balancing the comforts of routine with surprise, never so stuck in their tracks that they forget to admire the passing scene.
To cultivate conversation, don’t make it (and make it a chore). Enable it. Introduce spaces in the day where talk might flow, not cut off by other noise. Just being in the same room doing chores ensures companionship remains a relationship’s hub and heart, unlike the hedge-fund couple outed as communicating by email—at home.
Turn the radio down, the TV off, face each other when you’re eating, give the dishwasher a sabbatical, wash and dry up together. Then go for a walk. Give a dog a home. And hold a glance, remembering how it was when you couldn’t be sure what that mind was thinking. Sure you can now? How presumptuous. Find out.
HOW TO FIGHT
Ever felt trapped in a soap opera: same story line, faintly different script? You are. Most couples tussle about the same set of issues, and how tends to matter more than why. Psychologist John Gottman, at the helm of the U.S.’s “largest love and marriage lab,” found that
some argue a lot but find