I don’t know what we spent the last ninety minutes talking about. I don’t feel good afterwards, although that’s nothing new. I was tired, and it seemed as though the husband was irritable.

We started with picking up the last night thing that came up in counselling, when I’d noticed that he’d been less ill since I’d come out then before, which led me to accept that I had a big part in making his illness worse.

“How does that feel?” He asked.

“Heavy.” I said, then added when asked what that meant, “sad, low, guilty, shamed, a while load of negative type feelings I think.”

“That’s all about you,” he said.

I really didn’t understand. They were my bad feelings about myself. I was feeling bad because I’d made him more ill. I have no idea what I was expected to feel. I know that my feelings aren’t always what’s expected (that’s when I can accurately identify them), but these seemed logical things to feel.

I’m wondering what he expected from me? What form of reassurance was he after? What kind of acknowledgement? Did I take his question literally when, perhaps, there was a subtext that just passed me by?

There were long silences in the conversation. I didn’t know whether he was waiting for me to talk, or whether he was thinking. When asked he said that he was tired of “carrying the conversation” and unless he spoke, then there were silences. “Besides,” he said, “you asked for space to talk.”

I’m used to feeling as though I almost don’t need to be in conversation sometimes: he can talk without a break and without any input from me for a very long time. Conversations where he pauses really confuse me!

Hurrumph.

This really isn’t going very well; the conversation was very stilted.

We talked a little about expectation, how he feels that I put plenty of expectations onto him. I didn’t feel like challenging him because he seemed a little tetchy, or perhaps I was too sensitive and perhaps tetchy myself.

I said that I would put some thought into identifying what I thought his needs and expectations were and maybe we could talk about that together. I didn’t get much of a positive response for that, but it feels like a good idea, so I’ll give it a go.

As the conversation staggered to a close, he mentioned our “intentional time” – when was it going to happen?

I said that conversations like these were intentional time, but I’d also hoped that we would have dates together, or go to the quiz, or maybe go bouldering together – the point was for the time to be intentionally our time together.

We’re going to talk sometime on the weekend. I’m not clear when. I wasn’t feeling that engaged in the conversation myself. I was tired, it was the end of the week, but I was emotionally tired – and I had a sense of hopelessness in the situation, that it will never get better.