Friendeavours

my husband and i have just started couples therapy. We’re doing it to prepare for the arrival of our second child in November, because the arrival of our first was so goddamn awful. We’re very glad he’s here and all that, but the birth and aftermath were horrific. I had bad post-natal depression as a result, and our relationship took a battering. As we said to the therapist, we can’t believe we’re still together. But here we are, three years on – madly in love with our son; loving being parents; looking forward to doing it all again – but with obvious fears about certain horrors repeating themselves.

I bring this up because the therapist, Beth, said something that related to friendship. There we were, my husband and I, on the Zoom, feeling a lot like Richard and Judy with an audience of one. We were telling Beth about what I call The Year I Lost My Mind and Wanted All Men Dead, Including (Especially) My Husband. Beth asked us how we’d argued, when we’d argued. ‘Full flow,’ I said. ‘Like volcanoes.’ ‘Vomiting volcanoes,’ my husband added. It was a touching moment.

Beth nodded. ‘And how do you argue with your friends?’ ‘Carefully,’ I said, carefully. ‘I don’t argue with my friends,’ my husband said.

Beth nodded again, doing her best approximation of eye contact. ‘It sounds to me like you communicate with each other differently than you do with other people in your lives,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that… relatively normal?’ I said, tentatively. ‘It is,’ Beth said, ‘but I think you could reset your communication so that you don’t just vent into your primary relationship.’

I thought about this after the call. Did I not vent to my friends? (I have some venty Whatsapp groups, but that’s more venting about things rather than at the group.) Did I snap between modes when I talked to my husband and my friends? I remembered something my old housemate once said to me: ‘You’re a punisher.’ At the time, I’d been in a sulk for days after we’d exchanged a few cross words about something stupid. A punisher! It sounded like a formidable dildo. But that was years ago. I’ve really tried since then to put the work in. To not run and hide. To stay and… um, fight?

I called one of my oldest friends. ‘Do you think we argue in a productive way?’ She said, ‘We tend to negotiate before we reach that point.’ ‘How do we negotiate?’ I said. ‘In a thousand subtle spoken and unspoken ways,’ she replied. Huh.

Then it struck me. I’d been with my husband four years. I’d known some of my friends six times as long. And what I had with my husband was so intense because we’d had to endure a crisis together – childbirth – which was a baptism of fire, and then we’d had no chance to reset. No chance to acquire subtleties. It was life and death, in that room. My friendships had had the luxury of growing in relatively peaceful climes.

But now there was a chance to reset. And I could learn from what I had with my friends and apply it to my marriage, and surely that would make our communication as good as it was in my longest, strongest relationships: my friendships. Let negotiations commence. This volcano is tired.