I have thought, more than once, that I could have been a great man if I’d married somebody harder. That’s the sentence that has been sitting underneath thirty-one years of marriage. Not that I didn’t love her, but that she was too gentle with me, and I needed a wife who would have pushed me harder. Because she didn’t, I stayed exactly where I was. I blamed a woman for not being cruel enough to make me become something.
The feeling comes at strange times. When I watch another man receive an award, or read about someone who accomplished something I once said I would do, I look across the room at my wife and think, this is what she cost me. It’s an ugly thought, especially because she never cost me anything. I’ve known that since I was about forty, and I’ve carried the resentment anyway. It was easier to believe she had held me back than to admit I had simply stopped pushing myself.
In June, she mentioned over dinner that she was proud of the life we had built. I asked her, more sharply than I meant to, what exactly she was proud of. She put down her fork and looked at me for a long moment. Then she started listing things I’d completely forgotten: the house we chose, the children we raised, the years she stood beside me when I was struggling, the times she believed in plans I’d eventually abandon. She wasn’t proud because our life had been extraordinary. She was proud because we’d built something together and she had never needed it to impress anyone.
Then she said something that made me realize how badly I’d misunderstood her for thirty-one years. She said, “I always thought you were capable of more, but I never thought it was my job to make you prove it.” I couldn’t answer. She hadn’t been holding me back. She had been giving me the freedom I kept pretending I needed someone else to give me. And for the first time, I understood that I hadn’t needed a harder wife. I had needed to become the man I kept waiting for her to force me to be.
