Thought is Free

Thought is free.
~ William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 3, scene ii

Thus good relationship communication isn’t only self expression well enough for you to understand, or even well enough for your partner to understand; good relationship communication is self expression well enough for you to understand your partner.
~ OH, Compact and Differentiated

My wife bought me a t-shirt she happened to spy on a shopping trip with this Shakespeare quote on it. When she first held it up and I read and realized the quote was Shakespeare, my first thought was how 400 years later just how evidently true it was; you can get innumerable people’s thoughts with just a few keystrokes today –my thoughts among them– and the cost of (almost) every one of them is (almost) entirely free.

And as I thought this thought, my wife just smiled and said, ‘it just made me think of you.’ The shirt, the quote, her buying it for me, made her essentially seem say, “you are who you are, and even if you are someone who likes to think about things entirely too much, I love you no less for who you are.” It was all a very subtle, quiet and very effective love symbol.

Yet, a day later I was caught up in revising my adequacy and accuracy essay and in a fit of pleased-ness over getting a paragraph ‘just right’, I burst into reading aloud the first paragraph, with a “Hey, listen to this!” But I had only read the title and half the first sentence when she said simply, “No” - meaning “you are not going to make me listen to your philosophic ramblings.”

And I then immediately remembered what I (almost) never forget: in her compact, intuitive, holistic framework and way of experiencing existence, her fun, joy and meaning tends to come from the very experience of a thing, not from retrospective analysis of experience (such as how I have fun). Indeed, to sit around ploughing through philosophic and differential analysis only ever (as she might say) ‘sucks the fun’, the joy, the meaning, right out of the experience. And I know this about her.

There was  time when I didn’t understand this mind you, and then I would press a point like this, that “there really is something worthwhile here and you should really listen to it”, and I would press the point to, what must have been to her, its obscene conclusion. And because I believed the only thing the world needed for perfect peace was more talking about things, I wouldn’t understand why she was so upset with me, days later, either.

And so yes I was reminded: good relationship communication, good love symbol negotiation, is every bit as much giving what your partner wants and needs in symbols they understand as it is getting what you want and need in ways you understand. She did this very thing with the t-shirt – she gave me what I would understand in a way I would understand it – and of course with a distinct flavor all her own: she expressed herself well enough for her to understand me.

But I, I had forgotten and was even surprised I had forgotten. And this was when her response to my forgetting, a simple “No“, a simple rock hard ‘Oh no, not again you don’t‘ compacted into a simple “No” – it just made me laugh inside at myself and love her all the more.

And then there was more, for here I also realized “Thought is free” actually means something more closely akin to, “We’re all free to think what we like”, and yes, well, I certainly do think what I like. But if she happens to think some of my thoughts are not for her, is she not also free to think so? Yes, of course she is. And if she’d rather not participate in some of them, need she anyway for the sake of our love symbol negotiation? No, no of course not, she already proved, and right recently and effectively, that she loves me regardless of what I’ve thought up next.

So, I immediately did what any uxorious man would do, I proved I too knew her well enough to use the right symbols. I looked her right in the eye, and even though I was genuinely laughing out loud at myself by this point, I told her I was sorry, very sorry, and that I loved her, loved her very, very much.