finishing her sentences
by gregg levoy

Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker and my wife is a Californian and New Yorkers are used to doing everything on top of other people, and if you don’t interrupt them they think you’re not paying attention. Maybe it’s born of the subliminal expectation that when two people fall in love they become One, evidenced by such tender displays of fusion as feeding each other, wearing the same color clothes...and finishing each other’s sentences.

The problem is, my wife doesn’t like me finishing her sentences. I fancy that it infers a communion of minds and hearts, a sense of the kind of closeness people mean when they boast that “he knows what I’m going to say before I say it.” It implies telepathic understanding. We use fewer words, economizing our intimacy.Unfortunately, it turns out that about half the time I don’t actually know what she’s going to say, and I end up committing the conversational equivalent of cutting in line.

She considers this habit, even when well-intentioned, a form of trespassing, and says it makes her feel invisible. To me it’s just conversation. To her it’s a hostile takeover, especially in the heat of argument, when finishing my wife’s sentences, I admit, takes on a tactical quality. It’s interruption carried to the level of a military maneuver, designed to throw her off balance and control the conversation; a good way to win a battle and lose a relationship.
All this, it turns out, is fairly typical. Women tend to use language and conversation to create rapport; men to negotiate status. One is personal, the other positional, and both are hardwired. Surely it’s also exacerbated, at least for me, by the fact that by the time I reached voting age I’d clocked something like 20,000 hours in front of the television, bestowing on me a Sesame Street attention span.

It is only by catching myself repeatedly—being caught is actually closer to the truth—that I’m slowly amending this long-standing conversational colonialism. And once you start catching yourself, it can be like focusing on your muscles or your breathing while playing the piano. You become self-conscious of something that’s normally an autonomic activity like breathing, blinking and salivating, and it can throw your game off, though I suppose that’s the point. To throw it off and relearn it so that I actually get what I’m after in relationship, connection rather than disconnection.

Finishing my wife’s sentences, though, is just one of many unwitting encroachments we visit upon each other in the name of togetherness. She turns up the radio too loud. I underline in her books in pen instead of pencil as she requests. She tries to strike up friendly conversations while I’m working. I snore like an 18-wheeler downshifting on a steep grade. She’s always asking me what I’m thinking. I’m always giving her unsolicited advice. In microcosm, these are just snippets from the wider social fabric. At one end of the continuum are the micropolitics of everyday life with its little interpersonal imperialisms, and at the far end is invasion and war. But increasingly it seems to me that my individual work to change this is the work of the world; the small steps are the big picture. I ran across a bumper sticker recently that said, “Maybe the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about.”

Changing these habits requires retooling the whole contraption of human relations, carving new furrows in the brain, and an effort that’s almost gymnastic. But it also comes down to the little upgrades in attention that I’m able to manage in a moment. I remember a friend of mine once telling me that he had a personal “mission statement” that went like this: “My mission is to create more peace and kindness in the world through my work, my actions and my relationships.” And I thought, great, but what happens when someone wants to cut in front of you on the freeway? Are you going to step on the brake or the accelerator? Because one leads to more peace and kindness in the world and one leads to less.

Sometimes my wife and I negotiate these challenges by the skin of our teeth, but negotiation’s the thing. Keeping the lines open, being willing to give an inch to make a mile, creating borders that are firm but porous—and hardest of all, speaking up when the borders are breached: I love you, but get off my foot. In the interests of sovereignty and peace, and with the discretion born of being endlessly confronted about it, I’ve taken to finishing my wife’s sentences mostly in the privacy of my own head. It cuts down on profanity in the house and, more importantly, it braids courtesy and kindness into our relationship, and plows in the new furrows quietly.

 

Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Random House), is a former reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today, and husband of the artist Rose Sierra.
[ gregglevoy.com ]