Amy Lu's View

Even though this is just a two person play, sometimes I’m not the co-star. Sometimes, I’m not even on stage. 

After 30 years of marriage, I’m just starting to learn the lesson that sometimes, Chad isn’t thinking about me. 

This may sound a little harsh, but it’s actually rather freeing. This shift in perspective is helping me realize that when Chad is frustrated or annoyed or mad, it’s not necessarily about me. And yes, this also applies to recognizing that I’m not always the cause of his positive emotions and experiences, but I may not be quite motivated to explore that insight yet. 

I think most of us feel we’re the hero of our own stories, and that everyone else is a supporting character in our story, or maybe just an extra or in the audience. It’s so hard to imagine that there are an infinite number of other stories simultaneously happening where we’re not the main character. We may just be a prop or scenery.

A mundane example of how I center myself in Chad’s story is that I get annoyed when I see Chad cleaning in the kitchen. The feeling arises before my mind has a chance to kick in and think, “Amy, you’re being silly and unreasonable.” I think part of this feeling is territorial–even though I’m hardly Martha Stewart, I feel like the kitchen is MINE because I’m the one who is always eating, and thereby always looking for or assembling food. I also can’t help but imagine that Chad is thinking “Amy does a crappy job cleaning the kitchen” when he’s cleaning something up. Maybe sometimes he thinks that, but I bet most of the time he just thinks “Hey, this should be cleaned.”

Imagination is the magical means that empowers us to see the world through another’s perspective. I don’t think it’s possible to have empathy without imagination. But for me, it’s far too easy to get wrapped up in imagining how someone is feeling or thinking about me. It’s hard for me to really believe that I may just be part of whatever they are considering or contemplating, or I may not even be in their equation. 

Sometimes our imagination can take us down dubious paths. At some point during the middle years of Chamy, we realized that we were having fights that Chad wasn’t actually present for. “I don’t think I said that,” Chad observed when I referenced something he had supposedly said. “I don’t think we even had a fight about that.” “Oh yeah,” I clarified, “that’s just what I knew you would say, so I didn’t bother actually talking to you about this.” 

While Chad and I agree that I probably am usually right when I imagine what he would say and that we can both save time if I just go ahead and have the fight for the both of us in my head, I now try to sometimes make the effort to include him in a real world argument. Who knows, my imagined responses for him may be wrong. And even if I’m right in playing the role of Chad, it’s still good to sometimes make him do the work of being a participant. 

I can’t imagine love without imagination. I need imagination to understand Chad’s point of view, and to understand that he has his own story. And we both need imagination to create a story of us, and to imagine who we are together, and to make sense of who we have been and who we want to be. 

Most of all, I sometimes need imagination to believe that it’s even possible for Chad and I to love each other in all our messiness and weirdness, and that it’s possible for love to survive and thrive when the world feels just too hard and mean. 

I don’t think my powers of imagination will ever be strong enough to understand why Chad gets angry that he has to eat lunch, but I can at least imagine a world where we successfully share a life together anyway.