She said I didn’t consider her needs. I was pressuring her to be social when she needed time alone. I wanted her to see things my way and wasn’t listening. In turn, I thought she wasn’t accepting the reality of where we were. We just stared at each other in our small room. There was nowhere to go.
If we had been back in New York, I would have left and met my best friend at a neighborhood bar to complain about her. He would have supported me, and I would have felt entitled to move on, repeating the dating cycle I had been stuck in for more than a decade.
On the ship, however, there was no escape. I walked to the outdoor deck underneath the bridge and sat on a metal box filled with life vests while she stayed in the room. For the whole afternoon I just sat there, replaying our conversations.
There were moments she had told me she needed space; I just hadn’t heard. Did we really need to be more social? Where did that come from? Why did I feel that way? There was no one to talk to, to tell me I was right or wrong. The conversations in my head felt so familiar, repeated from past relationships where I blamed the other person and moved on, patterns that suddenly felt so obvious. I had never allowed myself to move slowly enough to truly understand what was being said. I never recognized the gap between what I said, what I did and, most importantly, what I wanted.
Hours later, as the sun set, I walked back through the windowless corridor, entered our room and sat down next to her on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I am too,” she said.
We fell asleep on her single bed.
Two days later, we arrived in Liverpool, England. In ship time, it was almost our one-year anniversary. We checked ourselves into a four-star hotel, ordered room service and watched a bad movie.