We Should Talk

How I love those words.

So maybe this is a female thing,  but I LOVE it when someone says that to me, even if I think the ensuing conversation is going to be negative and fraught with tension.

Okay, so maybe it’s just me and I’m weird.

But still.  I would rather talk about stuff than not talk about stuff.  I don’t tiptoe around elephants very well.  I’m more likely to give them a swift kick on my way past, just to see what happens.

So I don’t care if it’s that someone just wants to bare their soul to me or if they want to test the waters and see what I feel about something or even if it’s that I am totally in the wrong and they need to take me aside and have a little come-to-Jesus meeting with me.  If it’s a real topic and there are real feelings involved, I am SO there.

My husband is a different person, however.

So when he says, “We should talk,” he literally means he wants to exchange words with me about any topic that happens to be current.  He does not mean he wants to connect on an emotional level.

You can imagine the confusion that ensues.  We go out for a coffee date to “talk.”  He catches me up on his latest thoughts about a topic, picks my brain for family business items, comments on a social event, and we go home.  On the drive home I am strangely silent as I try to figure out what just happened and why I just spent an hour and a half drinking overpriced coffee and talking about things we could have covered at home over breakfast.

And so down the road I will say that we “never talk about anything,” and he will react with great surprise and list two or three talks that we have had in the past couple of months, good talks wherein a lot of words were said.

This is why it is so important, not just in a formal debate, but in everyday relationships, that you define your terms before getting your knickers in a twist.

Then again, if I went to him and said, “We should feel,” he might think I was saying something else altogether.

It’s clearly time to invent a new word.