Lacking the desire

At dinner I had asked my companion if she'd ever been married to which she simply replied "yes".

With little to go on I figured I'd ask more, "For how long?"

"It was pretty short" she said.

This was like pulling teeth! "Like a year?"

"Technically, I guess you could say so."

I'm thinking that maybe they lived together briefly and were divorced in about a year. Did I need to ask more? No, I don't think so. I got my practice in asking the questions! It's not like she talked about how they'd tried to work things out, or about how she'd learned anything from the experience. Even if she had learned something, having to draw it out of her didn't seem like a sign of strong communication skills.

Later I considered that not everyone has a desire to be in a long-term relationship, or to ever be married. I can't guess all the reasons. If it's because they're lacking in relationship skills at age forty then it's not my job to walk them through the learning process (though my old self would have readily volunteered).

I guess if you've never had a good long term relationship then you don't know what you're missing. The same way I have a difficult time grasping what it's like to have children, because I've never raised them myself.