Talking To You.

The sex is completely dispassionate, not in the usual way where the lack of passion is meant to enforce ownership and hierarchy, but in the way that our bodies come together as a way to compensate for the intimacy which is more elusive than ever. We know it cannot be replenished this way yet we continue to wake up in the morning and fuck anyway, because those thirty-minutes are all we’ve had together for weeks now. Those thirty minutes before the sun comes up and responsibility rears its demanding head.

It’s been a rough month.

We’ve been sick. I have a very close uncle who had emergency spinal surgery and needed a lot of support, which has also been emotionally-challenging for me, there is something harrowing about having to discard the diapers of a man who has changed yours. He never had any kids, he always said I was it for him and eventually, being *it* can mean having to participate in re-teaching your second-father how to walk. We’ve been moving apartments, retrieving our life from storage after six-months of living in limbo to find *everything* needs repair and installation, it’s more tedious than people realise, to have to dismantle and rebuild your bed with such regularity. My grandfather passed away a week ago after repeated emergency hospital stays and surgeries, an onslaught of relatives and ceremonies followed post his demise. We’re the only “young” members of my family around so we’ve had to be the ones running around for everything. My grandmother has rapidly advancing dementia, my mom and my aunt are strung out caring for her and we are strung out caring for them. We’ve been dealing with all of that while continuing to work and parent.

For the first time in our relationship, we actually haven’t had any time to give to one another. I know, that’s life, I have it no worse than anyone else, but I’m human, it’s been difficult and I’m missing the routine, loving ease of my daily life, and relationship. That’s my happiness, it’s the place where I *want* to live my life and it is so unsettling when I go to bed in my own room, but don’t feel like I am *home*. I give details of my day to the person I love, but it feels like I am just talking to a *person sleeping beside me*. We’ve been catching up over violent, disconnected intercourse every morning as a desperate attempt to grasp at one another, to remind each other that love will still be waiting for us at the end of this ordeal. Of course, it doesn’t work, it’s like rubbing a balm into a cut that needs stitches, but sometimes a balm is all you have available. It’s funny, I constantly hear people talking about not having the time they want to have to give their partners, it is such a common issue that it feels like it doesn’t even warrant discussion, but its experience is so painful you cannot help but want to talk about it. Especially, with him, all I have wanted all month is the time *to talk to him*.

Last evening, we finally approached the end of this period, things are calming down and we had the evening to spend together. As we sat there, just talking, I literally felt the stress melting off my shoulders, I felt emotions returning to my mind, I felt myself catapulting out of auto-pilot and into sentience, and I could feel the shroud of alienation lifting from our new home to give way to the familiarity of my 7 PM pot of tea-and-talk with him. Talking is such a simple act, but it’s really not so simple at all. Anyone who knows me, probably knows I can go-on about any subject but with the people I *love* (sister, partners, friends), it’s the life-blood of intimacy and love, with them the subject of discussion is irrelevant, I want to hear everything they have to say about anything at all. I want access to their insides and this is the way to get it. I’m also very verbal as a person, language is everything to me and while I enjoy the intimacy of touch and silence (and well, violence) immensely, I don’t feel entirely seen unless I use my words to show myself. I am as reliant on words in my relationships as I am in my livelihood. If I cannot talk to the people I love, my world starts to crumble and I start to drift away into solitude. The world carries on and I do my part but I am completely disconnected, I operate from function-to-function like an algorithm.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? When we think of talking, we think about it so casually, like it’s just any words, but when it manifests in the form of desire to talk to someone in particular, it’s a very stark form of acceptance. My parents, they mostly only talk to argue or placate, and outside of that, they seem very annoyed by the other person wanting to speak or *anything* they say, but with my partner, I feel like every word is worth its weight in gold, he makes every single one of them feel so desired. Every word he has to say feels exciting to me, I love the sound of his voice, but every sentence lays bare the mechanics of his brain, and I love that a lot more. It is the only thing that makes me feel like I can look inside him and I want to look inside him. It doesn’t matter if he is an expert on election recount procedures, I just want to know what he thinks about it and how he formed those thoughts. I can say anything, he can say anything and all of that information we share is genuinely desired by the other person. It doesn’t even have to be *stimulating*.

On the subject of *stimulating* conversation, we are designed to think a particular way, there is an idea about *intellectual* discussion being *oh-so-hot* but what seems to make the discussion intellectual is the subject matter. An hour on world politics is intellectual, but an hour on the layout of your neighbourhood is not so intellectual. I don’t get it, I don’t give a fuck about having an intellectual topic of discussion, I don’t really care *what* is being discussed, I care about finding people with whom I love to talk because they provide a great environment, they listen, they contribute, they have *their own* thoughts, they desire mine, they approach subjects from a perspective that is different than mine, they share freely and without posturing, they’re unafraid to reveal themselves and to be emotional, they can challenge and be challenged without taking it too personally. There is so much that goes into being an ideal environment of conversation for another person that by comparison, finding someone you like to fuck is so easy. Even “intellectual” discussions are so easy to find, they’re incidents, but a person with whom you like to talk regularly and consistently about anything is very, very difficult to find, they are environments.

Especially in romantic relationships.

In most long-term romantic relationships, I have observed a few trends. Either, most discussion becomes about functionality of life—children, pets, finances, errands, management—or it becomes a predictable format of sharing the same data every day (what I ate, who I met, when I left work). It also happens that partners begin to talk to each other with only the intention to vent and complain about all the little things that happen every day to bother, hurt and annoy us. I mean, of course, it’s okay to be space to vent for one another, but if that’s the *only* talking, I couldn’t survive it. People often romanticise the early stages of their relationships and wistfully recall how much time they would spend talking to each other. *We talked all night.* That little nugget frequently features in the origin story of many tales of love but then we stop talking *like that*, and that’s the kind of talking about which I am speaking. I need that kind of talking for a relationship to feel gratifying.

Sure, there are elements of managing life about which we need to speak, there is vital information to exchange, there is a need to offer an ear for one to vent and I recognise the value of those things but it’s only worth it if we use it to enable talking for *connection*. When we sit down to talk, there is never an agenda, there is no plan, no awkward need to fill in the gaps with weather or budgets or children, no need to devolve into discussing *issues*, no fear of discussing them, no idea what we may discover about one another and a genuine hunger for the words of one another. Our conversations go anywhere, and even after all these years, I look forward to them every day. They are everything we are: passionate, curious, interested and in love. They are the most important thing to me.

What do you talk about