Consequences #3 — Stuart
Anger scares me. But the silent treatment is worse.
I have this urge to communicate. Often this is not to convey any particular message, you understand, just to make a connection and to get a little empathy going. On balance I’m probably 60% Mars (all dynamism and fixing), but still that essential 40% Venus. Like Sybil Fawlty, I love to say “Ooh, I know …” and talk for the sheer pleasure of talking. Content is frequently unimportant and repetition is perfectly acceptable; I’d rather have an argument than say nothing at all. The important thing is to hear the sound of someone else’s voice. In an emergency, the sound of my own will do.
Silence rarely satisfies and so even anger has its attractions. In a negative way, it’s a positive emotion. As the Arch-Pistol once archy observed, “anger is an energy” — though often a bitter pill to swallow, it implies at least a misguided passion. It’s a cliché, but also a truism, that love and hate are not opposites but, rather, intimately entwined. The real relationship-killer is indifference.
Anger suggests that someone cares. They might care about the wrong things, their motivation might be ugly, blind and fearful, but they’re still burning brightly. What I find so much harder to deal with is an absence of care, a dwindling ember, a battery running low. A person who has ceased to communicate, to engage or to acknowledge — whether in general terms or on a more specific level — becomes a grey, impenetrable void. If you’re not engaged, you’re vacant. If you don’t acknowledge, you deny. “Panic and emptiness!” as E.M. Forster so memorably put it, follow as inevitably as night follows day.
So all I ask is this: bathe me in ruby-red kisses or shower me with white-hot coals, but never stem the flow of your emotions. Adore me or abhor me, but say you’ll never avoid me. Love and hate are but two sides of the same coin and my deepest terror is that one day the currency of our union will be unthinkingly mislaid or — worse — spent. Don’t put it into the hands of another, or let it fall between the cracks of the pavement or the cushions on the sofa. Cradle it like a small bird or clasp it tightly like a squirming cat. Whatever you do, never let go.