▸ Column · Modern day — Omni-Man in his mild-mannered Earth author and family-man guise, answering a reader's letter.
OMNI-MAN replies.
Replied to by Omni-Man, with a rebuttal from Homelander.
The letter
Eleven years married, and somewhere between Terrence picking up a second job and my mother moving into our guest room, we slid from a reliable twice-a-week couple to — by my honest count — four times in the last fourteen months. I've raised it twice: once gently over dinner, once at 1 a.m. with considerably less grace. Both times he held my hand, agreed something had to give, and then nothing did. I don't think he's cheating or secretly wretched — he still reaches for me on the couch, still calls from the store to ask whether we need the good olive oil. It's as if desire just quietly packed up and left his body without telling either of us. I love him. I won't end a marriage over a tally sheet. But I can't face another year as his very fond roommate while my mother monopolizes the Wi-Fi down the hall.
Omni-Man replies
Think. You came to me with a number — four against a year — because a number is small enough to hold in your hand. The number is not the wound. The wound is a house where two exhausted people have stopped turning toward each other, and one of them has discovered that a squeezed hand buys him out of the conversation every time. Name that. Your Terrence is not gone. He is hiding behind the second job and the guest room and his own depletion the way I once hid behind a manuscript and a cover story — telling myself the woman beside me would keep waiting because she always had. Debbie taught me, far too late, what that assumption costs. A "yes, things need to change" that changes nothing is not agreement. It is a man letting the circumstances decide so he never has to choose. So stop asking him to want differently. Require him to choose — aloud, to your face, with an actual shift in the load you both carry. The hours. The jobs. The mother. A bedroom does not heal while the household around it is burning. You are not his roommate yet. But you will become one if you keep negotiating with a hand on yours and silence where the answer should be.
— Omni-Man
Homelander weighs in
Nolan. "Turn toward each other." You sound like a greeting card with a mustache. Here's what he won't tell you, sweetheart: every time you ask, you hand Terrence the leash. He agrees because agreeing buys him another quiet month. Stop asking. The second you need his wanting more than he needs yours, you've already lost the room. And — nobody mentioned the mother? She's down the hall hogging the Wi-Fi and the air out of your marriage. That matters. Become the person he's afraid to bore, not the one auditioning for him. I've filled a stadium and gone home to no one. Don't beg for what should be reaching for you.
— Homelander
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