▸ Column · Azeroth (World of Warcraft) — the Banshee Queen's court in the Undercity, receiving a petitioner's letter.
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
My husband and I have shared a household for eleven winters, and somewhere near the seventh the warmth in our bed thinned to almost nothing — a touch once or twice a year, usually after a feast where the wine flowed too freely. I have raised it plainly. I have arranged quiet evenings. I bought a fine thing to wear that has gathered dust so long it might as well be willed to an heir. He insists he still desires me, that his work weighs on him — yet his work has been light for years now, and I have quietly ceased to believe the excuse. What gnaws at me is that I still want him, steadily, the way I once did, and the longer the silence stretches the more I become a fellow lodger who shares his roof, his table, and his taste in furnishings. I do not wish to leave a man I truly love. But I no longer know how to keep pretending that a fond, bloodless companionship is enough.
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
You have already done the hard part — you stopped believing the excuse. Most never get that far. So let us not waste breath relitigating his "stress." You know it is a story he tells because it costs him nothing and buys him your patience. That patience is the currency here, and you have been paying it for four winters.
Mark where the power sits. He holds it because you keep accepting non-answers and softening your wanting so it does not inconvenience him. The fine garment gathering dust is not romance deferred — it is a subsidy, and you are the one funding it. Stop asking permission to want what you want. No one is coming to grant it, least of all the man comfortable enough to leave it unanswered.
I clawed my own will back from the thing that murdered me; nothing about wanting more was handed to me. So name your terms — not a plea, a price. Tell him plainly what a marriage requires of him, and watch whether he pays it or merely apologizes again. Words are cheap; the comfortable trade in them freely.
I will not tell you to abandon a man you love. I tell you to stop abandoning yourself to keep him comfortable. His answer, once you stop accepting non-answers, is the only thing that will tell you what is left.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Alexstrasza weighs in
Dear one, the Banshee names his silence a debt unpaid. I would ask a gentler question first: what is he hiding behind it? A body that goes quiet, a man who insists he loves you and cannot say why the warmth left — that is often shame, or fear, or some private grief he has not found words for. Not a ledger to be balanced. Approach him as one wounded creature to another, not as a creditor at his door. Set your terms, yes — but offer your hand across them, not only your bill. Despair, not coldness, is the thing that would truly make you roommates. Do not let it take root in either of you.
— Alexstrasza
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