The letter was from 1998, only a few years after we married. My wife’s mother had written about me, and at first my wife smiled because she thought it was going to be something affectionate. Then she read the first paragraph again and stopped smiling. Her mother had written that I seemed to spend every visit talking about another woman from my past, always describing how intelligent, organized, and calm she was. My wife had never heard that name before.
She kept reading while I stood across the table. Her mother had noticed something I had spent twenty-six years hiding: I was constantly comparing my wife to someone who wasn’t even part of our life. She had written that my wife seemed desperate to impress me and that she worried I was making her feel as though she could never quite measure up. My wife looked at me and asked whether her mother had ever confronted me about it. I told her no. She said, “Then she knew you were doing it before I even understood what you were doing.”
There were several letters, and each one made the same point in a different way. Her mother had noticed that every compliment I gave my wife seemed to come with an invisible comparison. When my wife cooked something I liked, I praised her by saying it was “almost as good” as something the other woman used to make. When she handled a difficult situation, I told her she was finally becoming more like the person I admired. My wife had spent years believing those comments were compliments because I never said the comparison out loud. Her mother had recognized the cruelty of it before my wife ever had a name for what was happening.
My wife put the letters down and asked me why I had never told her there was another woman in my head. I said I didn’t know how to explain that I’d spent our entire marriage measuring her against an imaginary standard. She nodded and said that was exactly the problem—she had spent twenty-six years trying to win a competition I had invented and never told her about. Then she gathered her mother’s letters, put them back in the box, and said, “She understood what you were doing in 1998. I wish I’d understood it too.” She walked upstairs without another word, and for the first time in twenty-six years, I realized there was nothing I could say that would make her feel like she had finally been enough.
