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I Built Him a Perfect House and Forgot to Live in It
Fifteen years of emotional labor, and I still don’t know what I like for dinner — the slow inheritance of self-erasure
I was twenty-four the first time someone told me I had a gift. My mother, after I came home from a relationship that had ended at a parking lot behind a Trader Joe’s. She poured me tea, and I wrapped both hands around the cup to stop them shaking. “You know what your problem is? You’re too smart. You see everything he does wrong, and men can’t handle that. A woman who can make a man feel like a king, she’s the one he never forgets.”
I laughed. My mother’s wedding-day wisdom, like loose change in her pocket, something she’d picked up from her own failed marriage and refused to spend. I didn’t know I’d spend the next fifteen years becoming the working example.
The phrase in those self-help books, in the relationship coaches who populate Mandarin-speaking relationship coach communities, is emotional value, emotional value. Love is a marketplace. You’re either supplying or you’re in deficit. And a deficit is always your fault.
I became a kind of currency trader. His shoulders dropped two inches, time to ask about his day. His jaw tightened, so I touched his arm. He came home quiet. I put on the playlist he liked and made the risotto he pretended not to love.
