The Journal of Best Practices (23 page)

Kristen had gone so far as to explain why I was a perfect match for her, but once again I felt as though I hadn’t yet transformed myself into the husband I wanted to be. I wasn’t perfect enough. This notion sprang forth during my performance review earlier in the day and took my mind hostage. There’s nothing like a corporate employee evaluation process to snuff out any feelings of romance or joie de vivre. Then again, there’s nothing like an employee evaluation to help you see yourself as others see you—including the parts of you they try their hardest not to look at. Those are the things that are sometimes best left ignored, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to be perfect-ish for Kristen. I wanted to be perfect. The only question was how I might get there.

Sitting at a red light behind a sleek, black Mercedes, I finally made the connection. My company invested a great deal of time and resources into developing procedures that would ensure that all employees performed at their highest potential. Goals were established, and most important, things like project milestones and employee performance were tracked and reviewed at regular intervals. It was hard not to be successful when every step you took was measured, analyzed, and discussed.
Why not approach my personal reconstruction project with the same fervor?
I felt my eyes light up.
Brilliant!
I reached into my glove box and removed an expired vehicle registration card, and across the back of it I wrote
PERFORMANCE REVIEWS.
Identify strengths, weaknesses. Set goals, track progress.
“This is going to be great!” I declared aloud to no one, drumming my hands excitedly against the steering wheel.

That evening, I joined Kristen in our master bathroom, eager to get her on board with my new plan. She was sitting on the edge of our bathtub doing something to the bottom of her foot with a rock. Scrubbing, it seemed.

“Need something?” she asked without looking up.

I shut the door behind me, stepped over the towel she had spread out on the floor, and parked myself against the sink.

“Today I figured out how we can change our lives for the better and I want to talk to you about it,” I said, using my Business-Man voice.

“What, are you enlisting me in a pyramid scheme? You can drop the voice, by the way.”

“No, this is about me becoming a better husband,” I said in my normal register.

Kristen paused a moment, glancing at the bathroom door as though she were contemplating a quick exit. She sighed. “Go ahead,” she said, resuming her scrubbing.

I began by telling her about my employee evaluation earlier in the day and that I couldn’t help but wonder how she might have scored me as a husband had we conducted a similar evaluation at home.

“And what did you decide?” she asked.

“Well, I think I would do all right if we evaluated my performance as a husband since last March. But just all right.” She didn’t say anything. “That’s not good enough. I want a perfect score.”

Kristen set down the stone and wiped her foot with the towel.

“Dave, we’ve been over this. You’re fine. You’re a great husband. I couldn’t be happier. Pass me that lotion, please. The one you’re sitting on.”

Handing Kristen her bottle of peppermint-plum foot lotion, I couldn’t help but feel patronized. I couldn’t tell if I was reading her correctly, but she seemed a tad dismissive.

“Well, thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think I’m a great husband yet. I’m getting better, but I want to do more.”

“Okay,” she said, rubbing a dab of lotion onto the bottom of her foot. “So, what does this have to do with changing our lives for the better?”

I explained that since my epiphany in Chicago, I had come to appreciate her and our marriage on a whole new level. More than ever, I wanted to be the best husband I could be, but I feared I wouldn’t get there without a more formal approach to my process of Best Practices.

“I think we need to start conducting performance reviews on a regular basis,” I said. “We need to be able to monitor my progress and identify areas that still need improvement.”

“Performance reviews? You can’t do this to yourself, Dave. Really. Things are fine.”

“Fine isn’t excellent. Come on. Surely there are things I still need to work on. Name a few. Let’s hear it.”

Finally, Kristen looked me square in the eye. “Dave, seriously, you need to stop. This is stupid.” She ran the tub water to rinse her hands, as though the conversation were already over.

“It’s not stupid,” I said. “It’s brilliant.” I clearly wasn’t gaining any ground. I knew Business-Man could have easily sold her on the idea of performance reviews, but apparently this wasn’t the time or place for Business-Man. I was going to have to get Kristen’s buy-in using my own devices. Namely, badgering. “Kristen, I mean it, let’s hash this out. How am I doing on communication? What’s my score? Fair? Average? Excellent?”

“Oh boy.” She winced. “This ought to be fun.”

“What? What’s your problem?”

“You want to know what still needs work, Dave? Empathy.” Kristen stood up, pointing the foot lotion at me.
Uh-oh
. “How about that, Dave? I’m trying to relax and do my thing and you march in here, telling me what a lousy person you are and how I need to hold you accountable to some ridiculous standard that you’re putting on yourself. And I feel like I’m telling you every day, ‘We’re good. Relax. I’m happy.’ But you can’t let it go. And no matter what I say, you ignore it and tell me how I need to feel. I’m so sick of this.”

She stood there, arms akimbo, glaring at me. I didn’t know what to say. This was not the reaction I’d hoped for. All I was trying to do was to get her to sign off on my brilliant idea, and now I didn’t know if I should argue back, or apologize, or what. Then, before I could figure out how to respond, Kristen took a deep breath, ran her hands through her hair, and calmly, as though she suddenly remembered that she was speaking to her husband and not her husband’s syndrome, said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up, Dave. I love your brain to pieces but it handles empathy rather differently, and I get frustrated.”

“I understand.” I smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Because this clearly needed to be about her for a moment, I didn’t bother to mention that my lack of empathy was frustrating for me as well. But it was.

Although I now knew enough to say “I understand” in moments like these, I hadn’t made a whole lot of improvement since last summer when we began working on my difficulty with empathy. For example, while I had become much better at listening, I still needed to be told
when
to listen. I continued to have difficulty inferring the true emotional meaning behind Kristen’s body language and the things she said to me; I was constantly asking her to clarify her statements and emotions. All of this, as far as I was concerned, was more evidence supporting my theory that true empathy is God-given and damned hard to learn. I couldn’t build up my empathy skills because I had none to start with; I felt like a weight lifter who’d been born without biceps. My Empathy Quotient was still a crummy fifteen out of eighty. Unless we figured out a way to make do, my deficiencies in empathy would continue to test our relationship. If I wanted to be the ideal partner, I knew that we would have to resolve this issue once and for all.

Kristen sat back down on the edge of the tub and stared blankly at her toes. It didn’t take a mind reader to ascertain that she felt sad and annoyed. I could have apologized once again and left her alone, but that didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I kept the conversation going.

“As for empathy,” I said carefully, “I can learn to tune in to your feelings, and I can learn how to be more responsive. You’ll just have to tell me what you’re feeling and what I need to do. At first, anyway, before it becomes second nature like all the other stuff we’re working on.”

Kristen closed her eyes and massaged her forehead with her fingertips.

“Like, right now,” I said. “Obviously, you’re thinking something. Are you still annoyed? Are you sad? What is it?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

I sat down next to her, rested my elbows on my knees, and folded my hands. But I didn’t look her in the eye. Instead, like her, I stared down at her manicured toes while she wiggled them up and down. “Kristen, this is what I’m talking about. You have to help me understand what you’re thinking if we’re ever going to get anywhere.”

“I just wish this wasn’t so hard for you,” she said, finally. “I just wish that you were normal. And I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It’s just . . .” I glanced up at her reflection in the mirror and saw that she was trying not to cry.

“Go ahead,” I said, folding my arms. “Say what you need to say.”

“Me telling you what I’m feeling every five seconds and how I need you to react is not empathy.”

“No, it’s not. But we’re not talking about empathy anymore. We’re talking about what happens after empathy. We’re talking about sympathy. Feeling your emotions and responding to your needs are different things. I think I can be more tuned in and responsive without this magic ability to divine whatever it is you’re feeling. We’ll just work on it together, like we’re working on everything else.”

She nodded, looking somewhere beyond the bathroom door.

“I mean, who knows? Maybe it will become second nature to me. I’ll just be walking around, reading your cues, knowing what’s up without having to ask. I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I get it. You’re late for work and you can’t find your other shoe. Maybe it’s not the best time to share my idea for an invisibility cloak.’ ”

She kept nodding, kept staring. But now she was smiling. “Yep. That’ll be you.”

I sat up and wrapped my arm around her waist.

“Oh, oh, hang on,” I said softly. “I think it’s starting to work already. I’m empathying something.”

“Oh, really?” She chuckled and blew her nose into a wadded-up tissue that she’d removed from her pocket. I thought it was gross that she had been carrying it around, but I wasn’t going to say anything.

“Yeah, wait, I’m getting a reading. It’s a strong one. Okay, I’m empathying that you . . . are incredibly turned on by your husband right now and you feel a strong desire to have sex with him, preferably within the next ten to twenty minutes. Am I right?”

She laughed. “
Totally
right. You’re an amazingly quick study.”

“Good. See? I know this will work. And I’m telling you, these performance reviews are going to be the best things for us.”

Kristen rolled her eyes and chuckled again. “Okay, fine. We’ll try it. What do you want me to do?”

I described my vision for how the performance reviews could be structured and the sorts of things we might accomplish. For our first one, I suggested that we focus primarily on how I could be more responsive to her needs. “That’s a good place to start,” she said. “Just give me a few days to get my thoughts in order.”

A couple days later, we convened in the bedroom after the kids were asleep. I powered up my laptop while Kristen changed into her pajamas and washed her face. I had been preparing myself for something rather formal. Something with charts and spreadsheets and a clearly defined agenda. I had even reserved one of the laptop projectors from the office and brought it home. I was making room on top of my nightstand for it when Kristen walked out of the bathroom, pointed to it, and asked, “What’s that thing for?” Then she made me take it downstairs.

When I returned she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed with a spiral notebook on her lap. Our bed is very tall, and sitting there alone on the pillow-top mattress, sinking into the thick quilt, Kristen appeared to be floating on a cloud. I had intended to sit in the leather chair in the far corner of the bedroom, thinking it would lend the discussion a veneer of formality, but Kristen in her PJs made the bed too inviting. I arranged myself across from her, propped up by pillows that I’d stacked against the headboard, and rested my laptop on my legs.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.

“If you’re ready to evaluate my performance and talk about ways that I can be more responsive to you, then I definitely want to listen.”

“Okay. It’s just a lot to drop on you all at once, and I feel bad about that, but I don’t know how else to do it.”

“There is no other way to do it. This is the real value of performance reviews. Trust me.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just know that, in general, I’m very happy and I don’t mean for any of this to hurt you. I don’t want you to freak out.”

“I won’t freak out.”

“And seriously. Turn off your computer.”

I did, and at her request, I listened as she spoke. I didn’t challenge her comments or derail her train of thought. I just listened.

She started by discussing the things she felt were going well. More help with the housework, lots more constructive conversation and friendly, casual chitchats, which she loved so dearly. She thanked me for the littler, less critical Best Practices I’d been working on, such as coming to bed more quietly and not talking with a phony British accent so much.

Then she turned a page in her notebook. There were still a few areas of family interest that needed to improve, she said. My level of participation with the kids, for one thing. “Also, you need to learn to anticipate your own meltdowns before they happen so that you can manage them better in front of our kids, or better yet, deactivate them altogether. The kids can’t see you flipping out all the time.”

She turned another page, and things got serious. We had stepped into sensitive territory. Kristen began talking about times I had let her down and the pattern of selfishness and unresponsiveness she’d dealt with throughout our marriage. As she related a series of painful incidents, incidents that I would have rather not thought about, I was forced to consider her perspective on some of the darkest moments in our marriage, the worst of which being the time that I was home on Christmas vacation two years before. I had been looking forward to two weeks of R & R. But Kristen used the time that I was home to do things for herself that she never had a chance to do, getting her hair cut, getting caught up on work, and visiting with friends, while I stayed home alone with the kids. The first week was exhausting and I quickly became bitter and angry. My vacation was harder work than work was, and I was agitated by the unexpected shift in my plans. One afternoon I finally snapped and said the ugliest words I’ve ever said to Kristen: “This is unfair because unlike you, I can’t just pack up the kids and ship them over to Mary’s all week and then pretend like I’ve been raising them.” Hearing this, Kristen looked broken. Her face, her eyes, her entire body seemed cold and lifeless as she said the only words she could muster: “Fuck you, Dave.” She left the house without telling me where she was going. She returned a few hours later, and that night, standing in the kitchen with the same defeated expression, asked me, “Do you want to be in this marriage anymore? If we ended it tomorrow, would you even care?”