My husband's left shoulder rises when he is anxious. Just the left. About a quarter inch. He does not know it does this. I have, for twenty years, watched it rise at restaurants and at his mother's house and in the airport and in the bathroom mirror while he ties his tie, and I have come to know, by the height of his shoulder, more than he has known by the contents of his mind, about how he is doing on a given Tuesday at six p.m.
His jaw locks when he is angry. The masseter muscle, the one along the cheekbone, becomes visible. He does not yell. He does not, in twenty-two years of marriage, raise his voice. His jaw raises it for him. I have learned to recognize the jaw before the sentence that follows, and to ask, sometimes mid-sentence, are you angry right now? He often says no. Then he goes very quiet. Then, twenty minutes later, from the kitchen, he says, in a smaller voice, yes. I think I was. I didn't know.
His hand goes to his chest when he is sad. Open palm, flat against the sternum, often without him noticing. He will be telling a story about something that, on the surface, is not sad — a colleague's retirement, a dog he saw on the street, a song his father used to hum — and the hand will travel up to the chest and rest there, and I will know that the story he is telling is not the story underneath the story, and that the story underneath the story is grief.
I have been, for twenty years, the translator between my husband and his body.
I read Elliott Park's piece on learning to trust his own body's no, and I want to honor it. I do honor it. The work he describes is real. The men who do it deserve every sentence of recognition he gives them. I am writing this piece, as a counterpoint, because the work of those men is one half of a story that, for a lot of marriages, has another half — the wife or partner who has been doing the translation work, often invisibly, for the years or decades before the man started doing his own.
I want to write about that work. About the gift of being able to do it. About the cost of being the only one who could.
I met my husband at twenty-two. I noticed, in the first month, that his body was more articulate than his mouth. I had grown up in a family of women who talked about feelings constantly and a father who almost never did, and I had learned, very early, to read men's bodies because no one was going to translate for me. I came into my marriage already fluent. I had, in a sense, married a man whose dialect I already spoke.
I want to make clear: this is not a piece about a man whose mouth doesn't work. My husband talks. He talks well. He has a vocabulary. He is, by the standards of American men of his generation, unusually able to discuss his interior life. He has been in therapy. He has done the work. He has, in the years since we met, made enormous progress in his ability to name what he is feeling in language.
And — this is the and that the discourse on men and emotion sometimes flattens — he has always, throughout, been telling me things with his body that his language has not yet been able to deliver. The body is faster. The body is more honest. The body is, for most men, a real-time broadcast that the mouth is still drafting press releases about.
The wives, the partners, the husbands of men, the long-term close friends of men, the mothers of grown sons — many of us have been receiving the broadcast for years. The receiving is a skill. It is, in many of our cases, the skill we have most quietly honed in our adult lives.
What the translation looks like, in practice, in my marriage:
It is Tuesday. I notice, at dinner, his left shoulder is up. I do not, in front of the kids, name it. I file it. After the kids are in bed, I sit down on the couch next to him and I say, gently: your shoulder was up at dinner. I noticed. Do you want to talk about anything that's been pressing on you?
He often does not, at first. He says he is fine. I do not push. I have learned, over twenty years, that the body knows the answer before the mouth does, and that the mouth, on a Tuesday at nine-thirty p.m. on the couch, will catch up in its own time. I sit with him. We watch something on television. Around eleven-fifteen, brushing his teeth, he says, from the bathroom — and the geography of this matters, because he can almost never say it sitting still — I think I'm worried about my dad. I have, since the shoulder rose at six, been expecting some version of this sentence. I am, by the time it arrives, fully ready to receive it. We talk for forty minutes in bed, in the dark. He sleeps. I have, by the next morning, paid the cost of the translation.
The cost is not in the talking. The cost is in the carrying of the read shoulder for the five and a half hours between the noticing and the naming. The cost is in being the one who keeps the running translation log of his body. The cost is in being the only person in his life who is doing it consistently.
I want to be careful: my husband, since therapy, has begun to do some of this for himself. He notices the shoulder, increasingly, in real time. He has, on his own initiative, started a body scan practice. He is, in his forties, becoming the kind of man Elliott Park describes — a man who has begun to read his own body without requiring a wife to translate.
The translating, though, did not stop overnight. It did not, in twenty years of slow change, stop completely. There are still many afternoons when the shoulder is up and he does not yet know, and I do, and the choice is mine: name it now, name it later, or let it go entirely. Each option has a cost. The cost of naming it now is the small disruption of his unselfconscious moment. The cost of naming it later is carrying the read shoulder until later. The cost of letting it go is letting him stay alone with something his body has told me, but not yet told him.
I almost never let it go. I am, by some long-formed disposition, unwilling to let him be alone with information his body has already shared with me. The unwilling-ness is, partly, love. It is also, partly, a habit I am not sure was ever fully chosen.
Here is what I think the discourse on men and emotion, including in the best version of Elliott's piece, does not always fully include:
The men who are learning, in their thirties and forties and fifties, to read their own bodies are, in many cases, learning it inside relationships in which someone else has been reading the body for them, often for decades. The reading was not free. The reader was not, herself, getting the same translation in return. The reader was, very often, holding the running log of her partner's body while her own body's signals went to a different file folder, often labeled later, and often unopened.
I am not bitter about this. I love my husband. I have, in real ways, enjoyed being the kind of woman who can read his body. There is intimacy in the reading. There is competence. There is, on the good days, the satisfaction of being able to give a man you love access to information about himself that he could not otherwise reach.
There is also, on the harder days, a kind of accumulated fatigue that I did not have a name for until my late thirties. The fatigue of having read, by my count, several million signals of my husband's body over twenty years, and having, in return, almost never had the same depth of reading done on mine. He loves me. He pays attention to me. He notices when I am off. But the granularity of his read of me is, in twenty years, still less than the granularity of my read of him after the first six months. This is not a moral failing on his part. It is, in part, a difference in training. I was trained, from girlhood, to read bodies. He was trained, from boyhood, mostly not to.
The men learning to read their own bodies in midlife are, very often, also learning, in the same period, to begin to read the bodies of the women who have been reading them. That second reading is, in my experience, the deeper sign of the work. A man who has learned to honor his own no, in Elliott's sense, but who has not yet begun to notice the small persistent yes-but-tired in his wife's shoulders — that man is, in some real sense, halfway through the work. The other half is becoming a reader.
What I want to say, to other wives and partners who recognize themselves in this piece:
The reading is a gift you have given him. It is okay to name it, eventually, out loud. I named it, formally, in our nineteenth year of marriage. I said, in our kitchen, on a Sunday morning: I want you to know I have been doing this. I have read your shoulder, your jaw, your hand on your chest, for twenty years. I have loved being able to do it. I am also, at this point, ready for some of it to be reciprocal. Not because I am keeping score. Because I want to know that the work I have been doing has been seen.
He was, in his report, stunned. He had not, fully, known. He had benefited from the translation. He had not, until then, fully understood that the translation was a daily labor. He cried, briefly. He thanked me. He asked, in a small voice, what I needed.
I told him: I need you to start noticing my body the way I have been noticing yours. Not because I am demanding it. Because the marriage I want, in our forties and fifties, is one in which both of us are bodies being read, not just one.
It has been, in the year since that conversation, a slow shift. He notices my shoulder now, sometimes, before I do. He asks me, sometimes, in the kitchen, is that an anxious shoulder or a tired shoulder? He gets it wrong about half the time. The asking is the change. The asking is the half of the work Elliott's piece does not, in its frame, fully include.
What I want to say to the men who recognize themselves in Elliott's piece:
You are doing real work. I do not want to take that from you. Learning to read your own body's no is, as Elliott describes, slow and costly and important, and I admire any man who is doing it.
If you are doing it inside a long relationship — please consider, on a Tuesday, asking the person you live with whether she has, for some long uncounted period, been reading your body for you. Ask whether she would like, at this point, to be read in return. Ask her where her shoulder lives when she is anxious. Ask her where her jaw locks when she is angry. Ask her where her hand goes when she is sad. She has, almost certainly, known the answers about you for years. It is not, fully, fair that she has not been asked the same questions.
The body has two sides, in the way Carlos and Naomi described the mirror in last month's issue. One is the body you are learning to read. The other is the body that has been reading you. Both are bodies. Both deserve, in any marriage worth keeping, the full translation.
I am, on the days my husband asks about my shoulder, the more married woman I have ever been. The asking is the new architecture. The architecture, brick by brick, is what the second half of a long marriage gets to be, if both people are willing to put their hands on the wall.
For the male perspective this responds to, read Elliott Park's piece. If you are doing translation work in your own marriage, the translate-his-silence tool is a more granular companion to the kind of reading I describe, and the "when he says I'm fine" walkthrough covers the most common conversational opening for the kind of evening I describe above.