THAT'S MEN:Those couples who sit silently in restaurants after many years of marriage are probably still deeply in love, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
A FEW years ago I wrote a bad poem about a couple I observed in a hotel lounge bar. They were one of those couples who can think of nothing to say to each other and whom one usually assumes are married.
Unfortunately the poem was later published. I will spare the blushes of the magazine which put my words into immortal print. The poem was called A night out and it went as follows:
Wife and husband wordless,
tongue-tied in the Corrib Lounge.
She looks away, her face is closed.
He scowls into the dregs, plods to the bar.
She regards the bottom of her glass;
her lip twitches. He sidles back
with a thin smile and another pint.
Nothing for her: she will do the driving tonight.
What juvenile piffle! And I was far from juvenile in years when I wrote it.
I see the couple differently now. They have made the effort to come out to this place together. They have put on their best clothes and washed their faces.
He has slapped on the Brylcreem. She has done whatever women do with their hair. They could have made no effort at all but in fact they had gone to the trouble of coming out together.
Now they sit in a sort of polite and desperate silence, pretending to be absorbed in their own thoughts but really searching fruitlessly for something to say.
They look around pretending to be interested in their surroundings which have not changed one iota since the last time they looked around.
The English language has about a quarter of a million words and this couple know a great many of them but no words come to them now to help them to get a conversation going with each other.
There was a time when words spilled out of them like grain out of a sack (I am from an agricultural background so you have to expect this sort of thing now and again). There was more to say than they could get around to saying. Even silences were not embarrassed silences.
They were expressions of togetherness, of a shared view of the world.
In any case they have shared so much already: tears and laughter, very possibly triumph and tragedy. That they are not chattering like two teenagers may not matter all that much in the end.
Of course, they want to have something to say to each other and I don’t deny that they feel a certain tension because of the silence which afflicts them. And of course the wife may not be happy about being the designated driver and not having a few drinks.
Looking into your own glass and seeing nothing in it except your reflection is few people’s idea of a fun night out.
Yet they are willing to be together. They are willing to come out and sit in this polite silence with each other. They are not slumped in front of a television, each in their own world, or off about their own separate pursuits.
There is a consideration and a real love in what they are doing.
In a previous column I quoted these lines from the poet UA Fanthorpe:
“There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget the milkman, which remembers to plant bulbs.”
With the couple sitting in the lounge, unable to think of anything to say but willing to be there together, we are in the same territory. This is the territory of the love that you won’t find depicted in the Hollywood or Bollywood movies.
It’s quiet and deep and it is based on millions of shared experiences of everyday life.
And, yes, sometimes people run out of words. Sometimes when you pull them out of their natural surroundings and into a hotel lounge, they have nothing to say.
But their love is true and that’s what I missed when I wrote that stupid poem.
Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, That’s Men, the best of the That’s Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas