Listening without fixing — the smallest revolution in a couple
When a woman moves through menopause, what she is waiting for is almost never a solution. It is, first of all, a presence.
There is, in the way most of us have been taught to love, a very old temptation: the urge to solve. Someone we love speaks of a pain, and our first move is to put it out, to patch it, to fix it. The way one fixes a thing.
But the body moving through menopause is not a thing to be fixed. It is a landscape that changes.
What it means to listen
Listening is not waiting for one’s turn to speak. Nor is it quietly waiting for the gap where one might slip in advice. Listening is making room. Accepting that a felt sense does not need to be understood in order to be legitimate. That a hot flush, an end-of-day exhaustion, a sadness without outline are not to be dismantled piece by piece — but received.
In the conversations that fed this book, one sentence came back, almost without fail, in women’s mouths: “I wasn’t waiting for him to have answers. I needed him to stay.”
Three concrete gestures
- Ask a single question, instead of offering five solutions. “What would help you, right now?”
- Name what you see, without judgement: “I can see you’re tired. I’m here.”
- Allow silence. Shared silence, when it is not avoidance, is one of the highest forms of tenderness.
The smallest revolution
Giving up the urge to fix is perhaps the smallest of revolutions, and yet it changes everything. For the other, when she no longer has to prove the legitimacy of what she is living, can finally move through, instead of defending herself.
That is where the shared road begins.
We are not condemned to silence. A single word, set down with care, is sometimes enough for two banks of a river to find a bridge again.